The Lion, The Snake and The Stone
by BoxyP
Summary: Harry Potter's first year at Hogwarts brings with it three friends who might just help him honour his biggest role models, a Slytherin rival in the form of one Evan Snape, and a mystery to be solved involving a small package hidden on the third floor. PS retelling set in the world where Lily Evans made different choices as a young girl, that ended up changing wizarding history.
1. Prologue: The Two Boys

**A/N:** The prologue is there only to give a general explanation as to how this world's Harry differs from canon Harry with respect to life circumstances and upbringing, and to introduce you in broad strokes to the Snake of the title, Evan Snape, who is Lily's and Severus' son. Skipping the prologue will not in any way hamper you from reading the story, and as its style differs considerably from that of the rest of the story, taking a look at the actual first chapter will probably serve far better to give you an idea of my writing style, the tone of the story, and the actual characters. I never consider prologues to be too informative of the story flow, and do like making mine stand out in the same way that I like making interludes, unusual POV scenes, and scenes of flashbacks and dreams stand out, to give flavor to the writing (which I know might put off some first-time readers, ergo my urging to skip it if it's not to your taste).

* * *

 **Prologue: The Two Boys Who Could Have Been One**

Harry James Potter grew up hearing stories about his parents. Potter, an old pure-blood family with wealth and standing in the wizarding world, could trace its ancestry back to the Peverells. The name was well respected, familiar, and nearly extinct, for his grandparents had died before his father had married his Muggle-born mother, and his parents themselves had followed within two years. James was the middle name chosen for him by his guardian, in memory of the sacrifice his parents had made for him to live. First name, though, had oft been a matter of question, as so many of his parents' friends had been told a different version, and thus believed him to be named alternatively Harold, Henry, Hadrian (Merlin forbid) or, in one particularly hilarious instance, Hieronymus. He himself found it hilarious that no one would actually believe his name to be simply Harry, but that was what it was, and if asked, he would have been quite happy to show his own enthusiasm on the subject.

Harry was told from his earliest childhood that he favoured his father greatly, with his completely untameable black hair, bad eyesight that required glasses and a natural charm that came effortlessly to him. From his mother, he had inherited a slighter build, which was one of the things he hated about himself, but his guardian promised would be absolutely essential for a Seeker, his favourite position in a Quidditch team. His father had been a Chaser during his Hogwarts days, and Harry had inherited his expertise and agility on a broom. The other thing that was blatantly his mother's was the colour and shape of his eyes, blue as brilliant as a summer sky, that were often wont to deepen into dark cerulean when he was very focused or emotional. His guardian had told him those were the eyes that had completely enchanted his father, back when such things as fighting dark lords and having a family were still ideas, rather than reality.

His guardian was an easy-going man with a fun-loving childish streak that never died out, even after assuming responsibility of an orphaned six-month-old child, and a brash personality that often made him clash with those of differing opinions. He'd never married, preferring the ease of casual relationships, and had only once made the mistake of introducing one of his lady-friends to Harry, who'd been nearly three at the time, and if asked today, eight years later, wouldn't even remember it. The disastrous incident was, thankfully, salvaged by one of his mother's best friends, after which his guardian had made certain to keep his private life well away from Harry.

This was partly the reason why Harry had very few female role-models in his life. His mother's best friend had her own family, and came over rarely after that one and only time Harry had been introduced to her son (or, more precisely, remembered being introduced), a play date that, rather than allowing the two boys to make new friends, only resulted in a very deep dislike, for the other boy was subdued, studious, shy, and sullen, the complete opposite of Harry, who was boisterous, playful, outgoing and cheerful. Why this was so, was at the time too difficult for Harry's five-year-old mind to comprehend, but by the time he could have, the status quo had already been set, and wasn't to be changed.

As far as friendships went, Harry's circle was rather humble in spite of his fame. His guardian's brother had a daughter one year younger, but she seemed afraid of him, and the only topic they could discuss was Quidditch, as both of their fathers had played it for their respective houses. Still, she was a girl, and in Harry's mind couldn't be considered under the category of 'best mate'. His best friend was a boy his age who was the youngest of six brothers in a rather poor family, whose parents were about a decade older than his own guardian. The boy's mother was, in Harry's mind, the epitome of motherhood, and his mixed feelings varied with the situation, for the woman liked to coddle, and Harry alternated between enjoying the attention, and feeling smothered. The oldest brothers held little interest for Harry, who, in his nearly eleven years of life had only seen them exactly three times, the middle brother was too rigid and pompous to want to be befriended. The twins were Harry's calibre, however, and would have been his best friends, had they not been, the first time he'd considered identifying a person as his best friend, at that stage when they wouldn't deign to give time of day to those younger than themselves. Still, they were pranksters extraordinaire, nearly at the rank of his guardian, and that always held sway over Harry's view of them. Their only sister was shy and never spoke more than three sentences to him, so he mostly ignored her. Aside from them was his guardian's best friend, a tired-looking, kind man Harry considered his uncle, who sometimes even acted as another parent to him, and who was his private tutor for the six years before Hogwarts.

The fame of the Boy Who Lived was a mixed bag in Harry's household. While he loved the attention, in the house, he was not treated in any special way because of it, and the only time he'd seen his guardian angry to the point of a smarting bottom was the day he had tried to use it as a ploy to gain something he'd wanted. His guardian had needed almost a week to start treating him normally again, and his uncle and guardian's best friend had explained to him during that time, when he'd come to the man with tears in his eyes, that he'd only gained his fame at the cost of his parents, and that he should consider the fact that every time he tried to use this fame for his own gain, he'd instead be essentially using this ultimate sacrifice his parents (and his guardian's almost-adoptive brother) had made. Harry, whose one unfulfilled heart's desire was to know his parents, whom everyone, it seemed, but he himself had known, never felt more shame in his entire short life than in that moment, and never did it again. That was the day he started hating the idea of people sacrificing themselves for him, and determined to stare death in the face if it meant others wouldn't be dying for him.

His favourite activity was Quidditch, of which he knew probably more than even the most zealous of fans, and his usual occupations were flying and pranking, neither of which demanded he sit down for long periods of time and read. Indeed, everyone who'd ever met him said that while his mind was very sharp, as things tended to come naturally to him without his conscious effort, his main problem in learning things was that he had too much unfocused energy, and was utterly unmotivated to direct that energy towards written word. From the stories his guardian and his uncle told him of their school years, however, he already had a preference for two subjects – Defence Against the Dark Arts and Transfiguration; the first, because defensive and offensive spells came much more naturally to him than any single charm without a specific effect on his interaction with others, and the second, because of the fact that he was a very visual person, and therefore had no problem imagining things in his head. As this was also something his father excelled at, Harry felt sufficient motivation for it, even if, at present, he could only learn the theoretical aspects.

In all, Harry Potter was a relatively happy child with no concept of Number Four, Privet Drive, the cupboard under the stairs, or the Dursleys. Had he any concept, however, he would have been altogether thoroughly relieved that his mother wasn't Lily Evans.

* * *

Evan Stephen Snape was not a child of wealth by any means, but such things mattered very little to someone of humble nature. Snape was a family name of little standing, one that would have been gladly discarded by his father for his mother's, had such a thing been seen as anything but a complete travesty in the wizarding world. As it was, his mother had taken it instead, and it had been given to him, the only name he'd known, and a name he quite liked if pushed to give an answer. His ancestry was that of the Prince family, a Pure-blood family reduced to his aging great-grandmother, for his grandparents on that side were dead and buried for quite a few years. The Prince family's wealth lay in their land and material possessions, more than any money in vaults, and the barest of ideas that his father might one day be recognised as the rightful heir was thoroughly extinguished the day he'd married a Muggle-born, the second in as many generations to do so. Stephen was the name of his grandfather on his mother's side, a man that had died the day he was born, and the reason why he'd been a preterm baby by a month and a half. Evan was the name his father had chosen because of his mother's surname, and if asked, Evan would have said the thing he loved most about it was that it connected him to his mother in yet another way.

In appearance, Evan also favoured his father a great deal – his hair was straight and shiny black, easy to dirty, prone to oiling and annoying to tend to. He had his father's long nose, though not as hooked, as well his elongated face. His eyes were his one feature he shared with his mother, piercing green and, framed with the curtain of black, rarely seen but instantly capturing attention when on display. It was the thing his father loved most about his mother's appearance, and in a way it made him feel that much closer to the emotionally closed-off man, as well.

He had both parents, and loved both equally, though in very different ways. He was an only child, and only had vague recollections of the time, filled with night terrors that had persisted to this very day, when he'd been four, when his mother was gone for nearly three months, at the hospital because of a bad stillbirth, and his father had been in one of his worst moods for the duration of it. It was (though, luckily, he didn't know it then) the one time his parents had drifted so far apart, it had nearly come to a separation. His mother was the kindest, most open-hearted person he'd ever met, quick to anger but even quicker to forgive, always having good advice and a willing shoulder to cry on. His father was a snarky, impatient man who had no tolerance for foolishness and even less for disrespect, a proud man who carried grudges and had no problem expressing his displeasure at every opportunity. In spite of that, Evan rather liked the man's possessive protectiveness, and the man's advice, while usually delivered in a cold, disapproving tone, always was spot-on. He had no doubt of his parents' love for each other or for him, but he was by far more comfortable with the man's rare hand on his shoulder or head, than the woman's openly affectionate kisses and long hugs (even though he secretly craved them).

Evan's natural introversion meant he had very few friends. He attended a Muggle primary school, something his mother insisted and his father grudgingly agreed on, but he was often viewed as strange and dislikeable there. While he did like the materials they learned, it was mostly because they gave him a better understanding of the subjects he truly enjoyed, such as Potions or Arithmancy, something his father was rather proud of. His one confrontation with the class bully had ended in a rather terrifying display of accidental magic, after which other children usually just left him alone. His one attempt at befriending a child of his mother's old, long-gone friends (or, more precisely, the one remembered attempt) had ended without results, mostly because he didn't have any inclination to actually try. The boy was loud, brash, inconsiderate and boastful, qualities that clashed harshly with his quiet, cautious, considerate and humble personality. The two friends he considered close to him were both girls and both a year younger than he. The first was the daughter of his father's old friend from Hogwarts, who was as shy and quiet as he was, and with whom he could share his interest in Potions and Herbology. The second was the youngest child of a very large family, a tomboy who wasn't afraid to speak her own opinion and defend him from her brothers. Her mother was great friends with his own, a willing mentor when his mother had needed one after his birth, which meant he was not an uncommon fixture in that household. Of the girl's brothers, he appreciated the wit of the prank-loving twins and the calm, dignified way the two oldest spoke to him, not as if he were an age-mate of their youngest two siblings, but as an intelligent, inquisitive, mature boy that he was. The middle brother was too self-absorbed and proud for his liking, and the youngest was too loud and brash.

Occasionally, when his father's acquaintances brought their children with them, he'd be forced to socialise, but they were all as conceited as their parents, and not rarely sneered down on his much less lavish clothes and possessions. If asked personally, Evan would have said his family was middle-class, but the children he met were of the upper echelons of their society, and that naturally put him in a somewhat subservient position, a position he hated from the bottom of his heart. Why his father maintained ties with these people, Evan wouldn't be able to say, but these encounters led to his fierce ambition to prove that being middle-class didn't mean he was less worthy than the others, nor that his ancestry defined his power as a wizard. Pride, he had aplenty, though his, unlike his father's rather poignant, in-your-face type, was quiet and expressed itself not in his relationships with others, but in his actions towards himself. He held grudges, but good deeds did often erase the bad ones in his mind, at least partially, and he had brains enough to know when another person's worth in a particular situation outweighed his own animosity and dislike towards them, a thing his father still often struggled with.

Evan's favourite activity was reading, and he very rarely went anywhere without a book. His public education may have been delegated to the Muggle teachers, but his common sense and intellect had been honed by his father, who often gave him challenging logical problems to solve with little to no help. He read crime novels and enjoyed snarky, weird characters who never ran out of amusing comebacks and usually got along only with their sidekick, a person who never lost faith in them. His wizarding education, though mostly theoretical, was advanced enough he knew his favourite subjects would be Potions and Ancient Runes, both requiring precision and patience, of which he had more than enough. These preferences, however, had, in his almost eleven years of existence, reflected themselves in his physical stature, and those who knew him often tried to, without any success, convince him that there were things other than books to be seen and tried in the world.

In all, Evan Snape was a relatively happy child with no concept of fame notoriety, prophecies, or foreign soul fragments. Had he any concept, however, he would have been altogether thoroughly relieved that his father wasn't James Potter.

* * *

 **A/N:** This story, and the series that it belongs to, take place from 1991 onwards and follow the timeline of the original HP books. If anyone is interested in the way these changes originally came about, i.e. how the story initially diverged from canon in the Marauder Era, there is a prequel series titled The Butterfly Wings and the Hurricane, with the first story in it named The Path Not Tread. Whereas this will be more an outright adventure genre, the prequel story is a heavy drama, so be aware that their tones do differ noticeably.

I will attempt to keep a regular schedule of updating, though as I'm currently in the final stages of my Masters degree, I can't make a firm promise of it. Also, if anyone would be so kind as to britpick for me, that would be greatly appreciated; I don't have a beta, so any mistakes are mine alone.


	2. Ch 1: The Hogwarts Letter

**Chapter 1: The Hogwarts Letter**

On this particular July 24th, the two boys who could have, in another life, been one single person, sleeping in a little cupboard under the stairs, unloved by his relatives and unknowing about the world he belonged to, both awoke to dull pecking on their bedroom windows. They both smiled in excitement, let the brown school owls into their rooms, and exchanged the thick letters for an owl treat. They both sat on their beds, studied the envelopes marked by the Hogwarts crest with the brave lion, loyal badger, wise eagle and cunning snake and addressed with green ink to 'Mr H. Potter, Red Bedroom on the Second Floor, 14 Sundance Street, Richmond, London' and 'Mr E. Snape, Raised Attic, 112 Ivory Way, Waltham Forest, London' respectively, before opening them. But whilst one boy tore it open with zeal, the other removed the wax carefully, like a precious artefact. They both pulled out the two thick pieces of parchment and read through them eagerly, they both grinned to themselves. Then, in exuberance often displayed by one but very rarely by the other, both boys ran through their homes to their kitchens, where, coincidentally, their guardians both sat drinking coffee, hurried up to them and showed them the letter with all the pride and happiness a nearly-eleven-year-old and an eleven-year-old can express.

* * *

"Oh, you got your Hogwarts letter," Sirius Black commented when a wad of parchment was thrust into his face over his Daily Prophet. He lowered his cup and the paper, took the letter from Harry, and read it through, his grin matching that of his ward. "See, I told you there's nothing to worry about, kiddo."

"Yeah, I know," Harry confirmed, nodding vigorously, trying to ignore his blush. Though usually very self-assured, Harry did have doubts from time to time, and Sirius and Remus were the only two people in the world who saw that side of him, the one he'd inherited from his somewhat shy mother. "I know you told me and all, but I still worried a bit, I guess."

"Well, then, there's nothing more to worry about now. So, when do you want to go to Diagon Alley to get your supplies?"

"Can we go for my birthday?" Harry asked, plopping down onto his chair with all the exuberance of an early-awakened child who's spent most of his morning energy already. "Then the wand can be my birthday present, like you said it would be."

"Are you sure you don't want anything else for your birthday? You'll be getting a wand one way or another."

"Yeah, but there's only one first wand ever, and I want that do be a present from you."

"Whatever you want, kiddo," Sirius agreed just as their resident house-elf, Milby, which Sirius had inherited from his late uncle Alphard, brought Harry his breakfast. As usual, seeing it filled not just with eggs and bacon, but also with fruit, Harry groaned. "No complaining, I'm not letting you eat whatever you want all the time."

"But you always eat whatever you want!"

"Yes, but I'm a grownup. Your mother would come back from beyond to kill me if I let you only stuff yourself with sweets."

"Plus, you're afraid of Remus yelling at you about proper parenting."

"I am so not afraid of Moony! How can you even think that?!" Sirius exclaimed in outrage.

"Because I've seen it happen?" Harry suggested with a smirk. "Hey, I don't blame you; I'm sure Moony wouldn't have been a Marauder if he didn't have _something_ to show for it."

"I'll have you know that Moony thinks I'm a very responsible parental figure."

Harry snorted. "Yeah, right. That's why you _didn_ _'_ _t_ forget me in that Quidditch store to go flirt with a _girl_ last month." Not that Harry had minded, but he really didn't see the appeal of girls compared to Quidditch.

"Don't pretend like you didn't enjoy it! You had free reign of a _Quidditch store_ for three hours!" Sirius said indignantly. "I'm the one who had to listen to Mr Responsibility making a big deal of it; you got yourself a new book on the French National Quidditch Team out of it."

"It's a _book_ , Sirius, not anything very useful."

"It's the French team! Honestly, where's your sense of patriotism?!"

"Cybèle Peltier is an awesome Seeker," Harry had the need to point out. "Besides, I don't see why you're so much against them, five of them are girls. You _like_ girls."

"But, Harry, they're _French_!"

"You know, it says in the letter that I have to take a foreign language."

Sirius gave him a look Harry interpreted as trepidation.

"Should I worry?"

Harry gave him a nonchalant shrug in return. "Dunno why you should; French is as nice as all the other ones suggested."

"Noooo," his guardian moaned, hanging his head, before lifting it with a determined glint in his eyes that Harry just knew would be hard to beat. "You are _not_ taking French, and that's final. You can take whatever else you wish, but not French."

"Oh, come on, Sirius!"

"Look, it says that you can choose German; German sounds a lot like English, it'll be easier."

"But I want to learn French!"

He didn't, really (or he did, but he knew that Sirius' sense of patriotism wouldn't be able to handle it, and he didn't want to learn it _that_ badly), but it was fun to mess with his guardian like this. Sirius had a very low threshold for annoyance, and he always looked ridiculously sheepish when Moony pointed out to him that he was being unreasonable, which Harry found hilarious.

"Come on, Prongslet, think of the use. What if you ever go to Switzerland and get to meet all those pretty girls that live there, and you can't talk to them because you've learned the wrong language at school?"

"I'm sure some of them would speak English," Harry pointed out, "and besides, why would I ever _want_ a girlfriend from Switzerland?"

"Oh, just you wait a few years, kiddo, then I'll ask you if you still think that. Just you wait."

Harry's practiced response was to roll his eyes, which he did with zest, before abandoning the effort and digging into the food.

"Are you really thinking about taking French?" Sirius asked some five minutes later, after he'd calmed down from his little rant.

"What do you think, Sirius?"

"You were messing with me?"

Having held it more than long enough, Harry burst into giggles over his food. Sirius' sigh of relief only propelled him into further bouts of laughter.

"Fine; have your fun on your old godfather's expense."

"I was going to ask if I could learn Italian, actually," Harry admitted after he'd managed to calm down. "It sounds cool, and I really liked Milan."

"It's not on the list; they may not have a professor who could teach it. Be sure to choose at least one of these, even if it _is_ , Merlin help me, French," Sirius advised. "But then you still have time. A more important question: do you want a pet?"

Harry gave him a slightly constipated look that he knew his guardian could easily translate – his first pet had been a Golden Retriever he'd had since turning three, a very loyal dog that had helped Sirius keep an eye on him on plenty of occasions he had to be away for a day or two, which in their household happened about once a month at the least. Unfortunately, Snitch had died six months prior, hit by a passing car, and Harry had refused another pet since then. "Ok, let me rephrase that, would you like an owl familiar?"

"What's the difference?"

"Aside from the fact that one is a dog, and another is an owl? Snitch took care of you when I had to leave, and I could more easily communicate with him because of Padfoot. So, in effect, he was more alike to a care-taker–"

"Babysitter."

"Same difference," Sirius waved it off. "In any case, owls are more independent and when you get an owl familiar, she'll be your friend, a very loyal one, but just a friend. The experience is really quite different."

"If you say so," Harry agreed doubtfully. He still missed Snitch quite a bit.

"I know you're still upset about him, but I think it will be healthy for you to try this out. If you really don't want it, it can stay here as our house owl when you come back for the holidays."

"Ok, you convinced me."

Sirius' smile was worth every doubt he felt in that moment. There were plenty of things Sirius was good at, but getting Harry out of his moping spells wasn't one of them (probably because he didn't know how to get _himself_ out of his own moping spells). Therefore, he considered this as one big win on his part, and Harry, who knew this fact full well, decided to let him.

"Oh, it says there that I can't have my own broom."

"And what would you have me do about it?"

"Oh, come on, Sirius, how can I play Quidditch without a broom?!"

"First-years are not allowed to play for House teams," Sirius reminded him pointedly.

"Like rules have ever stopped me before," Harry replied cheekily after swallowing another bite.

"You know what, I'll make you a deal. You manage to get on the Gryffindor Quidditch team this year, and I'll make sure you have the newest model, how 'bout that?"

"Wicked! Just you wait. I'll be the youngest player at Hogwarts in a hundred years."

"If you manage this, then you're already well on your way to being as awesome as your old man was."

"I'll be in Gryffindor, right?" Harry asked, doubt once again creeping up. His parents had been Gryffindors, and both Sirius and Remus were Gryffindors, as well. The mere idea he wouldn't be made him very uncomfortable.

"There's no reason you wouldn't be," Sirius told him, sounding truthful. "You're just like your dad, and he told me there was never any doubt as to where he'd go. Besides, Potters have been Gryffindors for generations."

"Sirius, you were a Gryffindor and all the other Blacks were Slytherins," Harry reminded him.

"Ah, but you forget, I'm unique," Sirius replied, grinning, and in response, Harry rolled his eyes. "I was an exception, kiddo, because I was not like either of my parents, at all. You know, Mother's favourite insult was that I was switched at St. Mungo's for her real child, that I wasn't a Black at all. Too bad I have the Black rakish good looks and charm to disprove that theory. You're just like your old man, Harry, a true Potter, and that's what really matters. Besides, it won't make a difference either way. Whichever house you get sorted into will be fine."

"Even Slytherin?"

By the slight wince at that, Harry had his answer. Even so, Sirius tried to cover for it, answering: "You won't be, I'm sure, but if you are, then just remember that Reggie and Cousin Dromeda were both Slytherins, and they turned out all right."

At that, Harry nodded vigorously, stuffing his face so much his cheeks bulged out in order to hide that this part of the conversation hadn't alleviated his doubt in the least. Sirius just smiled, though, and spent the remaining morning observing with amusement as every piece of fruit disappeared from the plate, while Harry became progressively more glad his guardian could be easily distracted. Still, though, by the end of breakfast, his worries were shelved for another day, and his mind was engaged in other ways, mainly the thought of playing pick-up Quidditch with Ron and his brothers this afternoon.

* * *

"Your Hogwarts letter. Good," Severus Snape said once he folded his _Daily Prophet_ and placed it onto the table by his plate. He then picked up said letter from his still-empty plate and read through it, while Evan tried not to fidget nervously in his seat, not even attempting to contain his smile. By the time the man was done, Lily Snape had joined them, placing breakfast food on the little table for four in their kitchen, and took the letter to read it as well.

"Congratulations, Evan. Are you excited?"

"Yeah. I mean, yes, I am," he confirmed and shooting for dignified (failing somewhat, but then, this was a special occasion) as he poured some cereal into his bowl and added milk.

"Do not forget to respond to it," Severus warned him, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes, Dad."

"Well, we'll have to schedule an outing to the Diagon Alley to get all your supplies, then," Lily decided with a nod, once again reading through the second page.

"You mean, you two will go with me?" His parents had their own little shop in Diagon Alley, and Evan usually got things they needed both personally and for their household alone, because both of his parents had little time for it, and during the holidays, he was a common fixture in most of the shops anyway (especially _Ollivanders_ and Flourish and Blotts).

"Of course. Getting your own wand is to be treated with all the pomp and circumstance it deserves. Although, you may do better just using our old books. Well, those that might still correspond to the syllabi."

"Your books, Lily," Severus cut in. "I'm not sure he could even read anything in mine."

"I don't mind," Evan replies quickly. "Your books always have much better suggestions, Dad."

"Of course they do, your father was always much more hands-on than I was," Lily confirmed, "at least until we got to our Masteries." Evan's mother had completed her Charms Mastery straight out of Hogwarts and, among other things, spent her time tinkering with spells and magical artefacts for a living, so it was a little hard to imagine her uninterested in experimentation, but then compared to his dad, few people actually could seem interested. In perspective, it made sense.

"My books have things written in them that are not for the eyes of dunderheaded eleven-year-olds."

"You wrote that stuff when you were eleven," Evan pointed out. "I'm not an idiot, Dad, I'm not going to use whatever spells you created unless I know what they are. Don't you trust me?"

In response, Severus raised an eyebrow, while Lily giggled in mirth.

"If you don't end up in Slytherin, I will honestly be shocked," Severus drawled after a moment of silence, shaking his head.

"But you won't be disappointed." It came out more as a question than a statement.

"Evan Stephen Snape, I believe we have had this discussion on several occasions previously."

"Yes, Dad."

"And what did I tell you then? Or were you too busy being insecure to listen to my lecture?"

"That I'll be in whatever house is best suited for me, and that you will be proud of me. But, Dad, what if I end up in Gryffindor?!" Evan had grown up listening to his father belittle most of Gryffindor qualities of a particular set of classmates. Of course, to his eleven-year-old mind, that instantly transferred to all Gryffindors, rather than staying contained to this particular group, so he'd always found it very strange that his mother never said anything in response to him insulting her (which, had Evan been a bit older, would have been understandable, as Severus never insulted Lily's Gryffindorish tendencies, a subset quite different from the Gryffindorish tendencies of the Marauders).

"Then I will consider you having those Gryffindor qualities that your mother has, and that there's enough of my Slytherin cunning in your head not to rush into foolishness without thinking like Gryffindor boys are wont to do."

"But you won't mind?"

"Your mother is a Gryffindor, you exasperating child, and I married her, didn't I?"

"Well, yes, but..."

Evan was forced to fall silent at that point, seeing how he couldn't actually think of anything to follow his 'but' except the fact that his father hadn't actually _said_ that he didn't mind, something Evan resolutely didn't feel like quibbling over (even if everyone – and especially Evan – knew that Severus Snape had plenty of skills in evading giving answers he knew wouldn't benefit him, and that this was most likely yet another situation like that). Apparently satisfied with proving his point (or maybe just getting out of upsetting Evan with his opinion), Severus went back to eating.

"Well, looking through this list, we're still no closer to getting this mess of the curriculum sorted out. Look at this; the Defence book's back to that ridiculous publication the Board of Governors managed to push through the year before we went into effect," Lily said, clicking her tongue in disapproval. "I knew Dumbledore should have found someone better than Quirrell for the class. I bet the Board's also found a way to say that hiring more professors isn't fiscally feasible, and it's still twenty-something staff to seven hundred-odd students."

From what Evan knew, witches and wizards of his parents' generation had managed to implement quite a few changes in the schooling system through the installation of another school body, that of the Council of Supervisors. He didn't know the specifics, only that the Council was mostly comprised of Muggle-borns in direct opposition to what the Board of Governors had been doing to the school for the past century and more, and that his school years probably wouldn't resemble his parents' in as great a scope as they could have, which, from what he'd heard of Hogwarts fifteen years ago, really wasn't a bad thing in the least.

"And you're surprised?" Severus asked, sounding slightly incredulous. "Regulus has been absent from the last two meetings of the Board, of course they already managed to backtrack on everything that was agreed upon. Plus, you know Albus is loath to fire to increase pressure, even if some of the people who deign to wear the title of Professor are so incompetent, they should be publically tongue-lashed for it!"

"Oh, don't be melodramatic, Sev. Aside from Binns, whom we got rid of years ago, most others are all right."

"What, like Slughorn? I could teach his class three times better, to speak nothing of his school books!"

"You're just bitter that he never favoured you in Slug Club."

"Like I'd ever deign him with my presence at that farce of a gathering!"

Smiling indulgently, Lily turned back to her son, who was observing his parents' usual bickering with joy. When they bickered like this, it meant they were both happy. Those few times they sat in silence or spoke to each other with false politeness were the times Evan had been afraid something drastic might happen. It never did, of course, they always sorted out their differences within a few days, but he hated those times nonetheless.

"Anyway, Evan, my suggestion is to take my revised Book of Spells collection and the new Transfiguration textbook I got a couple of years back, seeing how your father always was at best average in Charms and Transfiguration, and the revised edition of A History of Magic, since I know for a fact his old is too scribbled on to read anything, not to mention that it's missing at least three chapters. You're welcome to choose whichever you want from the others, and we'll buy the rest of them on our outing."

"Then I'll take Dad's," Evan agreed to that quickly enough, already knowing how useful some of the side notes his father made in his own books were. "Erm, Dad, do you think I should bring any other books with? I mean, if these aren't that good?"

It was one of his father's constant complaints that books used for Potions at Hogwarts were too disjointed. Like most subjects used to have, there was only one book for the first five years (up to O.W.L.s), and though it had a reasonably varied selection of Potions, it contained absolutely no real introductory explanations as to the procedures or theory behind technical details, like why certain cauldrons were better than others, how temperature changes influenced the potion, and so on. It was one of the books the Council of Supervisors was having trouble switching, since Slughorn really favoured it and thus pushed for it to stay. The good thing was that they'd managed to get _The Theory of Potion-Making: What to Do and What Not to Do_ as a complementary read on the roster, which at least should have, in theory, served to mitigate some of the worst mishaps with incorrectly brewed potions, though Evan held little hope of people actually reading it thoroughly enough to get something useful out of it.

"You'll still be taking the required textbooks with, young man," Lily said sharply, giving him a look.

"Yes, Mum, but I might need other books for homework and such."

"I'm sure you'll have better things to do at Hogwarts than spend all of your time pouring through obscure books your father prefers in order to do your homework, Evan."

"Like what, Lily? Getting into trouble, hm?"

"Don't be a hypocrite, Sev, you got into plenty of trouble yourself."

"Courtesy of the beloved Marauders, need I remind you?"

"Sure, they forced you to lurk around after curfew with Mulciber and Avery."

Oh, uh. Mentioning Dad's acquaintances was usually the first clue that he should cut in and divert the impending argument. So, with practiced ease, Evan spoke, making them both turn to look at him.

"Erm, Mum, you do know that I spend most of my time reading anyway, right?"

"Yes, but you'll finally be in a wizarding school, with other wizards and witches your age. Surely you'll find friends when you go."

"Maybe," he hedged, not wishing to discuss it with her. He knew she wished he'd be more outgoing, but truthfully, he didn't really know how to be friends with different kinds of people. He had two friends, and in his opinion, that was plenty, so while he acknowledged that he'd have to make some in his own year, he wasn't really planning on spending exorbitant amounts of time on them. "Anyway, it says I can take a cat, but Stheno is a Kneazle. You think they'll make a problem out of it?" Stheno was his five-month-old Kneazle cub, which he'd wanted since he was eight, and which he'd gotten for his birthday a month and a half ago. In those six weeks, she'd become as important to him as his parents, and separating from her for nine months was too painful to even contemplate.

"I'll confer with Albus, but I think you can take her," his father confirmed.

"Oh. Good."

"If you're done with breakfast, go get ready. I must speak with Albus today, and I refuse to be late on account of my son's sluggishness."

"Yes, Dad," Evan replies good-humouredly, glad that his father didn't reprimand him for the blatantly indulging tone as he scurried up the stairs of their narrow house to his attic room to start getting ready for his day.

* * *

"Treacle Tart," Severus Snape said to the stone gargoyle, corners of his lip upturned at the password. He wondered if Albus knew Evan's favourite sweet was exactly this one, before shrugging the little non-sequitur off and focusing back onto the matter at hand.

Headmaster Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was seated at his desk, working through a mound of paperwork, when Severus opened the door to the office. Looking up, the old wizard gave him a small happy smile and returned back to the letter he'd been reading. Obligingly, Severus seated himself in one of the guest chairs and waited his old mentor out.

Three minutes later, Dumbledore gently placed the letter back onto the desk and lifted his twinkling blue eyes to meet Severus' black ones.

"Severus, my boy. How are you?"

"I am well," Severus replies, inclining his head. "Evan's gotten his acceptance letter. He will, of course, be sending you a reply, but I see no problem in informing you that he's coming this year. One question he had, though, is whether a Kneazle would be an acceptable substitute for a cat."

"Ah, so you finally did get him one. For his birthday, I presume?"

"Correct. If you've forgotten, you were less than subtle in suggesting Arabella Figg as the breeder," Severus reminded him, rather poignantly.

Albus gave him an indulgent smile. "Quite right, my boy. This mind isn't what it used to be, you know." Severus snorted and rolled his eyes to show what he thought of _that_. "Well, so long as the paperwork is in order, I have no qualms about making an exception for him. He is, after all, a very bright young man who will make sure his magical familiar is of no danger to others."

"Unless they wish him harm, Stheno is quite harmless."

That was, of course, why Severus hadn't protested too much to a pet of that kind. Kneazles were known for their intelligence and fierce loyalty to their owners, and could be quite dangerous when threatened. Severus' own fears that, with the blasted Potter child in the same generation as Evan, history would repeat itself was actually quite acute, and he was determined not to let it happen.

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled knowingly, but he didn't comment further on it, turning, instead, to the business for which Severus was here today.

"Did you get a chance to study the plans I sent you?"

"Of course, Albus," Severus replies tersely. "Why you chose to make these measures such is beyond me, but any half-decent wizard worth his salt would be able to bypass them. I'm assuming that's the point. I do have several ideas for added protection measures, however, and I do believe at least one will appeal to your... sense of adventure."

"You must forgive an old man in finding little pleasures in his otherwise drab life, Severus."

"Yes, drab is the word." Pulling a wad of paper out of the inner pocket of his robes, Severus handed them over to the Headmaster, who unrolled them carefully and took his time reading.

Severus knew exactly which suggestion the old man was reading when his eyes began twinkling like mad. In some ways, he thought, Albus Dumbledore was as predictable as his own son.

"Yes, this will do very well. Excellent suggestion, my boy."

"I thought you might like it, and it has the added bonus of deterring most of the wizarding populace, as well. Especially a number of Slytherins of questionable standings as to the last war. Cunning is nothing without common sense and logic to back it up."

"When will you have everything prepared for me?"

"When do you need it?"

"Not before next week," Albus replied, leaning back into his chair slightly.

"Albus, I am still not convinced this is a good idea in the first place," Severus said with a weary sigh. He'd already tried knocking the stupid idea out of the man's head, but for all his pliability to change in the last decade, Dumbledore remained steadfastly stubborn in certain situations. "I know that Flamel is your friend, but is there no better option than hiding it in a school filled with children?"

"It is only temporary, and I will implement additional measures to insure everyone's safety. Severus, there is another thing I would like to speak with you about."

"Regarding?"

"Horace's wish to retire."

"Surely you're not asking me if I had any inclination as to taking his place, Headmaster," Severus replied, taken slightly aback but covering it up with a scowl.

"I assumed you'd be interested, yes. After all, you've been saying for years you could do a better job than he."

"There is no question as to whether I could, Albus, the question is whether I'd actually want to, and as it stands, I don't. It's enough that I have to contend with my own eleven-year-old brat, and he is, unlike most of your students here, actually tolerable. I don't like children, Albus, or have you forgotten that?"

"Yes, and yet you wished for two of your own."

"Don't go there," Severus warned him, voice hard and laced with malice. It was one of those wounds that would never heal, one of those wounds that had nearly torn his family apart, and he'd learned in the past years, with Evan's and Lily's help, to not pick at them. They might never heal, but they were better left alone.

"My apologies, Severus, it was not my intention to bring up bad memories. I just wished to point out that you could be a very good teacher. Evan is very advanced in potions for his age, is he not?"

"Evan loves to study, unlike ninety percent of dunderheads in this place. As a Transfigurations expert, I'm sure you have little concept of just how dangerous Potion studies are, Albus. One little slip of the hand, one little mistake, and not only would all your effort be destroyed, but you and those around you might be seriously injured."

"I may know much more of Transfiguration, my boy, but I am not so foolish as to think Potions to be a trivial subject," Albus admonished him lightly. "Please, consider it. Horace is surely staying on this year, and I suspect, also the next. He is rather reticent to lose his chance of... collecting... promising individuals that pass through these walls. He has also expressed his interest in Evan."

"I don't doubt that," Severus agreed with a snort. "Lily was always his favourite student."

"How is the lovely Lily? I haven't spoken to her in a while."

Severus rolled his eyes at that – he'd been by on Evan's birthday to bring the kid a present, he'd seen Lily then. It was only six weeks, after all.

"She's working on a new charm with Pandora Lovegood. That woman is a menace, Albus. She nearly ended up killing herself last year, experimenting with charms, in front of her daughter, no less. If Lily hadn't been there, she would very well be dead now."

"Yes, I have heard of the rather unfortunate incident."

"Rather unfortunate?" Sometimes, Severus wondered how he managed to surround himself with people without any common sense. "I shudder to think of what you'd consider a tragic incident, then."

"When you get to where I am, Severus, at my age, you will understand that there are always worse things than accidental death," Dumbledore replied with a dose of sadness in his voice, making Severus uncomfortable. He was no stranger to tragedy, having grown up unwanted and uncared for, being constantly bullied during his school years, nearly losing Lily more than once, and actually losing their daughter, but he was not the type of man to openly show his emotions, and, naturally, such shows from others made him ill at ease.

Rising to his feet, he pocketed the parchment with the security measure he was to add to Dumbledore's little plan for the Philosopher's Stone. "I will be brewing the potions throughout the next week. However, two of these need at least three months to be fully matured."

"That is quite all right, my boy, the other measures will hold out until November. And please, consider my offer."

Privately, Severus thought there was no chance in hell he'd actually accept it unless circumstances forced him to do it, but then, he was only thirty one, and he wasn't foolish enough to presume he'd know how his life went from here on out.

"I rather think you'd be more inclined to win Lily over than me."

"Alas, if only Flitwick would consider retiring, I know exactly where to search for his replacement. But he's still quite satisfied in his position."

"I don't doubt that, and let us not forget that her position on the Council might make that difficult. Of course, such trivialities never did stop you did they, old man, when you wanted something done?"

Albus gave him a little smile, blue eyes twinkling behind half-moon glasses.

"Keep me informed as to your progress."

"Of course, Headmaster," Severus confirmed, before inclining his head in a salute and whirling on the spot, his mind already turned to the numerous potions he now had to make for the Hogwarts Headmaster's silly games.


	3. Ch 2: The Diagon Alley

**Chapter 2: The Diagon Alley**

To say that Evan was excited about the family outing was an understatement. Not for the things he'd be getting, though he was looking forward to having his own wand, but because his parents had promised they'd go with him.

He was an old fixture at Diagon Alley, having spent most of his early childhood years in his parents' shop, playing quietly in the corner and interacting with the usual customers. After his mother had taught him how to read, he'd spent most of his days at _Flourish and Blotts_ , perusing the shelves and having lively conversations with the old, overworked manager of the bookstore. Of course, after he'd started school, he was only ever to be seen during the holidays, but that didn't mean he was forgotten by the various wizards and witches who owned property or worked at Diagon Alley.

Making the tour of these shops with both of his parents, however, was one thing he'd never done. Of course, on this Friday the 26th, he didn't have that many shops to visit in general – he already had all his books (and his parents had agreed to give him money to spend at the bookstore after they got everything else, since Evan and bookstore usually equalled hours gone, never to be regained), as well as scales, a cauldron and both glass and crystal phials, having gotten them for the first time for his eighth birthday, together with the promise to be allowed to participate in brewing easier potions for sale (he'd been brewing mostly on his own since he was six – there was a certain amount of magic that always needed to be applied to any potion, and such control was untenable for six-year-olds), and having the practice of never letting his supply fall below a quarter of the original one.

That left, first and foremost, _Madam Malkin's_. When the three walked in, Madam Malkin was already working on Ronald Weasley, who looked distinctly uncomfortable as the squat owner of the shop, dressed all in mauve, fussed over his robes. Just from a cursory glance, Evan could see that said robes were not actually new, but rather one of the boy's brothers', brought in for refitting. Evan peered around the room, searching for the familiar frame of his mother's unofficial mentor. By the time he had located her, Molly Weasley was already approaching them, Ginny hopping lightly beside her.

"Lily, dear, how good to see you!" Mrs Weasley greeted his mother, who smiled and accepted the hug of the shorter, older woman. "We were just about to visit your shop."

"Hi, Molly. I hope you're well?"

"Oh, perfectly well," she confirmed. "Severus."

"Molly," his father greeted, inclining his head, but staying at that. Their relationship was one of cordial respect, as neither much liked the other, but had to tolerate them for Lily.

"Evan, dear, I haven't seen you in months. My, you've grown."

Sending Ginny a cross look for giggling, Evan turned to the red-haired mother of his best friend and smiled slightly. "It's great to see you, Mrs Weasley. Thank you for the cake, it was great."

"I'm so glad you liked it."

"What little didn't end up on our clothes," Ginny quipped, grinning and rocking on her feet slightly. Behind her, Ron made an exaggerated snort, but his sister just ignored him. It was no secret that Evan and Ron didn't enjoy each other's company, so Ginny took great pleasure in annoying her older brother by constantly speaking of the times she and Evan hung out. Evan had actually asked her once why she did it. The look she gave him in return could have been answer enough, but she did take pity on him, seeing how he was an only child, and explained that in a household with six older brothers, she had to be as ruthless as necessary to avoid brotherly bullying, especially towards the youngest of the six, who hated being overshadowed by the others and loved rubbing Ginny's nose in the fact he was friends with the great Harry Potter. Of course, at this point, Ginny had promptly changed the subject, and Evan had preferred it that way. He'd met Harry Potter only once, but the boy was his total opposite, and seeing his best friend go googly-eyed and girly about him was enough to ruin his day.

Madam Malkin approached them presently, a friendly smile on her face. Pleasantries were exchanged, she fussed a little over the fact he was finally starting at Hogwarts, then promptly got him onto the stool next to Ron Weasley. As usual, she slipped the black robe over his form as if he were a dressing doll, dishevelling his hair completely, and began to circle him in order to pin it to the right length while he tried to straighten the mess on his head out.

"Well, aren't you pretty like that," Ginny commented, stepping away from their mothers and joining the boys. Evan glared at her, while Ron laughed.

"I'll make sure to be here next year when you have your fitting, Ginevra," he replied with a sneer. "I bet I'll be the one laughing then."

In response, Ginny pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest, while Ron laughed outright.

"Oh, Gin, someone who can ruffle even your feathers! I'd pay to see that!"

"Shut it, Ronald!" she yelled at him, punching him in the shoulder as she did so. By his pained expression, it seemed her punches were far from weak. One thing that truly disturbed Evan about his friend: she had no compunction about being shrill and violent when her ire was raised; he didn't think that would benefit her in the long run, not in the least. _He_ certainly wouldn't let her hit _him_ like that, not if she didn't want to suffer his retribution. "I'm sure going to look better than you in those robes, anyway. _And_ ," she emphasised, turning back to Evan, "I'll look dignified getting them fitted, too."

"I'll believe it when I see it," Ron said from his spot, while Evan just inclined his head.

"I do think you'll look better than he does in Hogwarts robes."

"Hey! That's my sister you're talking about!" Ron exclaimed, rather indignantly. Evan gave him a withering look, while Ginny laughed.

"Do you think he's deliberately missing the point of my comment, or is he really clueless?" Evan said, looking at Ginny but keeping Ron in his peripheral vision and barely stiffing his laugh as the youngest Weasley brother became redder and redder in the face. His sister had no such reservations as she nearly bent in half, fighting for breath through her laughter. Ron, insulted and annoyed, jumped off the stool the moment his robes were taken off of him by Madam Malkin's assistant, turning back to give them both a glare that didn't do anything to stifle his sister's mirth or ruin Evan's mood.

"Well, Ginny, I at least get to go to Hogwarts this year. You'll be stuck at home, all alone with Mum."

That seemed to work like a bucket of cold water on Ginny, who sobered up so fast Evan though he'd get whiplash. To his utmost surprise, there were actual tears in her eyes as she watched Ron stomp back to his mother's side to confer with her quietly.

"Hey, you ok?" he asked the girl, wishing Madam Malkin would just finish with his clothes, so that he could comfort her. Not that he was all that good with physically comforting distressed friends, but he'd been on enough receiving ends of such attention from his mum that he could probably emulate.

"Yeah, I'm great," she lied, wiping her unshed tears with angry jerks of her hands. "He's such a git."

"You'll be with us at Hogwarts next year," he reminded her gently, trying to lift her spirits. "It's just nine months anyway."

"Right. Look, I know you're trying to help, but you have no idea what it's like to be me. I'm the only one left. At least, before, I had Ron. Now I won't have anyone."

"Yeah, well, at least you _have_ siblings; I nearly lost my mum _and_ my sibling at the same time."

Her expression twisted in misery, and he immediately felt bad for not swallowing the biting retort, even if it was the truth. He'd been friends with girls for long enough to know that when they were angry or upset, the worst thing one could do was answer back in kind. It was just that his mum's stillbirth was always a very touchy subject, and Ginny should have known it.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean–"

"No, you didn't," he shot back, though he did shut his trap after that, forcing himself to change the subject. "What happened to that friend of yours, Luna? You live close by, I'm sure she'll want to hang out with you."

"Yeah, but she's weird. And who am I going to play Quidditch with?"

"Since when have you ever played Quidditch with your brothers?" he asked with a frown. As far as he knew, no one in her family was aware of the fact she regularly broke into their family broom closet and flew when no one would find out.

"That's not the point," she hissed back, before wilting again. "It's always like this. Ginny, the youngest child; Ginny, the only daughter; Ginny, the poor dear; Ginny, always gets bullied by her brothers and left behind. And now I won't even be able to hang out with you, when you're leaving, too."

"Ginny, you give as good as you get. In a few years, they'll be too scared of you to tease you, anyway. And as for getting left behind, well, you can't do anything about it, it's the way things are. Life's not fair. You just have to toughen up and deal with it, which I know you can do. Besides, you always complain how you can only be free of them when you come over to my place. Now you're getting that, and you're unhappy? What's with that?"

Once again, she pursed her lips, hopefully thinking about his words, before nodding and straightening up.

"You're right. I survived ten years living with six brothers, I should enjoy this one without them. It's the only one I'll get, in any case."

Feeling quite proud of himself, Evan nodded in assent just as Mrs Weasley called out for Ginny. With a wave and a smile, the girl was gone from the shop with her family, leaving Evan to stand in silence and compose a letter in his head as Madam Malkin finished fitting his robes.

Their next order of business was getting a wand for him. Evan had been to _Ollivanders_ enough times to not be caught off guard by Garrick Ollivander's appearing act and soft greeting. He smiled at the old man and shook his hand politely.

"I thought I'd never see the day you'd be my customer, Evan," Ollivander said with a smile. "Seems ages ago you first walked into my shop, wanting to know everything about the wands and how they choose their wizards. And here you are now, to get one of your own."

Evan blushed slightly at that, but just nodded in response.

"Lily, so nice to see you. Phoenix feather, aspen, twelve and a quarter inches, swishy. A mature wand for a young revolutionary. How is it treating you?"

"As well as the first day, Mr Ollivander," his mother confirmed with a smile.

"Severus, of course. You two did seem inseparable, even at eleven years of age. Rigid ebony and dragon heartstring, thirteen and three quarter inches. A wand for a fully trained wizard. I had my doubts about that wand, but it seems to have chosen rightly, as always."

Evan's father confirmed this with a jerky nod, clearly discomforted by the man's rather formal address. While his father didn't exactly socialise with the other shop owners of Diagon Alley, he did have a rather mellow relationship with the old wandmaker. Being here as a customer, however, seemed to have put the man on edge, and Evan idly wondered why that was; no doubt it had to do with what Mr Ollivander had just said about his father's wand.

"Did you know, Mr Snape, it is rarely that I have seen such difference between the first and the second wands as I have observed with your parents. Both of them," he added rather significantly. "Your mother's first wand was willow and unicorn hair, ten and three quarter inches; wonderful for charmwork but a rather tame wand. Your father's first wand was walnut and dragon heartstring, nine and a half inches, extremely unyielding. A wand for the intelligent, but a rather indiscriminate wand, all told. Not one of my favoured makes."

"Why would that be?" Evan asked, his curiosity on the subject only flamed by the old man's words. His mother had told him that her first wand had gotten broken during one of the battles against Death Eaters she'd participated in, but his father never spoke of how he'd come to change his, beyond saying it had happened in his fifth year, and that left Evan reaching for any piece of information on the topic he could find.

"I find that the usual reason for cases such as these rests in the user's maturation," Ollivander explained. "While the first wands are those that we learn with, the adolescence years are the most formative ones, and many people change drastically between who they were as children, and who they are as adults. Naturally, wands change and grow with their wielders, but I have found that quite a large number of them begin performing ineffectively in spite of this, if their wielders' personalities begin differing to a great extent from what the wand finds attractive. So in quite a number of cases, it has actually proven beneficial to change the wand after reaching maturity. Well, then, Mr Snape," Ollivander said formally as he concluded his little lesson and finally stepped past his counter towards a grinning Evan, who'd been rather looking forward to this – buying a wand from old Mr Ollivander was, in his opinion, a rite of passage, and he found that he'd have rather been disappointed, had the old wandmaker not treated him so formally. "Which is your wand arm?"

"Left one, sir," he replied respectfully, letting the enchanted tape measure zip around him, measuring completely irrelevant parts of his body for show – it was one of the first things he'd ever asked Mr Ollivander, and he'd giggled when the old man had said, _in strict confidence, mind you, young man_ , that it was mostly to keep inquisitive eleven-year-olds occupied while he chose wands to present to the customer.

"No two Ollivander wands are the same, Mr Snape, just as no two unicorns, dragons or phoenixes are quite the same. I've found these three magical beings to be the best suited for wand cores, though other wandmakers use other substances, such as Thestral tail and Veela hair." He plucked the tape measure away from Evan's ear and opened a long, narrow box he was holding in his hand. "Right then, Mr Snape. Walnut, unicorn hair, ten and a half inches, springy."

Evan picked it up and swished it through the air, without much success. Mr Ollivander took the wand from his hand before he could do much else, shaking his head and offering him another one.

"Red oak and phoenix feather, eleven inches, nice and supple. Try it."

This time, Evan had no sooner lifted the wand than Mr Ollivander took it from his fingers.

"No, no, that won't do. Here, pine and dragon heartstring, nine and three quarter inches, somewhat bendy."

The shower of sparks could have, very generously, been called weak, and Evan wasn't feeling generous in the least bit. His parents had told him of their first time purchasing wands, and how Lily had tried only three wands before she'd come across the right one, the one she'd used all through her schooling . Severus, however, had been a very difficult customer, going through dozens of boxes before settling on his. After that wand had been irreparably damaged, Dumbledore himself had taken Evan's father to buy the one he was now using, and which Mr Ollivander had been somewhat reticent to sell him, for reasons the man never explained. Obviously, he wasn't as displeased with that sale now, but it was a little mystery Evan was determined to solve at some point.

Mr Ollivander had known Evan for six years now, and all the wands he'd given him to try did give out at least some reaction to being in Evan's hands, something the eleven-year-old attributed to the fact the wandmaker could deduce from knowing Evan's character exactly what kind of wand would favour him. Still, they were up to their ninth attempt when they finally found the right one.

"Beechwood and dragon heartstring, twelve and a half inches, slightly flexible."

The wood was warm and comforting under his fingers, as if it was telling him it liked to be there, and Evan smiled to himself before returning it to the wandmaker, who packed it into its box and handed it over to Evan's father, while his mother gave Mr Ollivander the six galleons they owed. As they were walking out, however, the old man called him back in, bending down to rummage under the counter.

"Evan, I believe you might find some interest in this," he said, straightening and handing over a book, which Evan took with great interest. The cover was leather-bound and relatively new, and the book's name was _Wandlore and the Perfect Wand_ , by Gervaise and Garrick Ollivander.

"You wrote this," Evan commented, feeling a rather powerful need to just plop down in a chair and read straight through it. Wandlore was something he'd found very few books on, but which interested him greatly.

"Yes, with my father. It is a professional read, Evan, one I shared only with my fellow wandmakers and a few select wizards I deemed worthy of the knowledge it contains."

"Thank you, sir! I'll be very careful when reading it."

"Oh, no, no, no. The book's yours, a birthday present."

Lifting green eyes to the old man, Evan tried to figure out if this was just some bizarre dream, or if it was really happening. The slightly indulgent smile on Mr Ollivander's face was enough to confirm it. Hugging the book to his chest lovingly, Evan gave him his best smile.

"This is... I mean... thank you, sir. This means a lot."

"I thought it might. I trust you know how to handle it." The message behind those words was clear to him – it was not to be found by other people. Evan nodded, rather vigorously. "And, may I suggest, study the differences between your parents' first and second wands. They might reveal some truly fascinating information about them."

Evan thanked him again by shaking hands very formally, then raced to catch up to his parents, who were walking down the street slowly, obviously in some sort of a discussion. His father gave him a disapproving look when he had to stop and gulp a few lungfuls of air, but his mother only smiled.

"How about we get some ice cream at Florean's, then you two can go on to the apothecary."

Evan gave her an apologetic smile, knowing in advance their visit to Mr Mulpepper would be a lengthy one, but his mother waved his concern off with a one-armed hug he suffered through willingly enough for her not to notice his discomfort.

"What is that book, Evan?" his father asked, eying the book in Evan's arms rather critically.

"Oh, Mr Ollivander gave it to me for my birthday. It's about wandlore, and he co-wrote it with his father. I can't wait to actually sit down and see what it says about my wand."

"That book is staying with us."

"Yes, Dad," he agreed willingly enough, knowing how valuable it really was. They stopped at _Magical Menagerie_ on the way to buy some cat treats for Stheno, his Kneazle, and again at _Scribbulus Writing Implements_ to get him a more descent quill than the one he had (and the one he hated and pretended to have lost on more than one occasion, so that he'd not have to practice _nice penmanship, every decent witch and wizard should know how to use proper writing implements_ – though he had the fullest intention of bringing normal pens and pencils to school with him no matter what his father thought. Other wizarding kids were free to stick to the complicated if they wanted; Evan was quite happy with the simple), as well as the rest of his writing supplies. He'd gotten an advanced Potioneer's Journal from Professor Dumbledore on his birthday (self-filling, cross-referencing, owner-identifying, voice-reacting and some other hyphenated adjectives that made it sound like something for the Unspeakables, rather than potion masters, and which made it infinitely more cool than the normal versions in Evan's mind), but he got himself a student version for the things they'd be working on in Potions class. He had a great discussion with his father about the colour-changing ink, which he was finally allowed to get with his own money under the assurance that he'd use it for studying and not just fooling around.

They sat inside in the corner by the window at Mr Fortescue's snug little shop, with his mother chatting about their years at Hogwarts and his father making scathing and snide remarks about most of the students she mentioned, while Evan ate his treacle-and-lemon ice cream and smiled at their stories. Afterwards, his mother left to tend to their shop, while his father and he spent the next hour at _Mr Mulpepper's Apothecary_ , getting the many supplies his father suddenly needed for some Top Secret Assignment he was doing for Professor Dumbledore, and which Evan was not to ask about. Afterwards, his father carried their purchases back to their shop, while Evan slipped into the bookstore. He only re-joined his family at the end of the work day, after which they went to dinner in Muggle London, before riding the tube back home.

Stheno greeted him as he entered their little home, making eights around his legs and rubbing her shapely head against his calf. She was a silver tabby Kneazle with intricate-looking dark grey swirly spots and stripes, five months old and already bigger by half than cats of the same age, with intelligent blue eyes, ears too big for a normal cat that resembled those of lynxes and caracals with their pointy shapes and long tufts, and a serpentine tail with a slightly bushy tuft at the very end that evoked an image of a lion. She followed him as he ran up the stairs to his attic and sat on his lap while he ordered his thoughts and wrote the letter he'd begun planning as soon as Ginny had complained about not having anyone to spend time with.

 _Dear Alya,_

 _How was France? Since you should have arrived yesterday, this letter should have no problems reaching you later on this evening, if Radagast doesn't get lost; he's getting so old that I wouldn't be surprised there's a repeat of last time._

 _I finally got my Hogwarts letter two days ago, and today my parents went with me to get school supplies. My wand is made of beech, with a dragon heartstring core, and is twelve and a half inches long. It feels warm when I hold it, just right, like it's always belonged in my hand, simply incredible. I haven't used it as yet, since I just got back home, but Father promised to teach me a few simple spells in the next month, and I'll show them to you if we get a chance to see each other before I leave._

 _Mr Ollivander also gave me a book he wrote about wand-making that I'm dying to read. You know he mentioned to me once that he and his father perfected their products, and that this was why their wands are the best in all of United Kingdom, but he never told me more. I have a feeling that's what this book is about. I checked the contents, and it talks about all the wood types he uses, as well, so I can finally figure out the difference in my parents' first and second wands._

 _Father said he spoke with Professor Dumbledore, and that I'm allowed to take Stheno with me to Hogwarts, which is a relief. She's amazing, better than Radagast, even, and she already helped me once when a group of older children thought it funny to steal my book while I was reading it at Fortescue's. She jumped right on top of the boy's head and scratched him until he dropped the book, then kept them busy while I escaped. Otherwise I'm afraid they would have hexed me, and I couldn't very well fight back against spells the way I can fight Muggle bullies at my old school._

 _Oh, before I forget, I ran into the Weasleys at Diagon Alley today, and Ginny asked how you were. She was wondering if you'd want to exchange letters with her, since she liked you quite a bit. Between us, I also think she wants to have a girlfriend, since, as you know, she only has six brothers and me to hang out with. I said I'd ask you, but if you're willing to do it, I think you should write to her directly about it and just leave me out of the whole thing. That is, only if you want to be friends with her; you haven't yet told me what you thought of her, not that we have exchanged any letters internationally in the past month. She loves Quidditch as much as you do, and she's very smart. I know for a fact you can at least discuss the Bat-Bogey Hex, she keeps saying that's the first spell she'll learn when she gets her wand._

 _In any case, hopefully I'll see you some time in the next two weeks. I'll be at my parents' shop, as usual, so perhaps you can convince Mr Black to take you with when he meets with Dad, and we can try to figure out that charm you were interested in._

 _Hope to hear from you soon,_

 _Evan_

He read through the letter once more, satisfied with how it turned out. Some delicacy was necessary in this matter, he thought, since there were two very different girls involved, but he had his Slytherin cunning, and he was not averse to manipulating the truth slightly in order to get what he wanted. With that done, he placed the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and ran down the stairs to the kitchen, where their old Screech owl, Radagast, stood perched in his cage. Evan's mother had gotten him as payment for some charmed object or other, and he'd already been quite old at that time. Evan, who had been six when this had taken place, had insisted on renaming him, and the owl had taken a liking to him because of that (to be perfectly honest, Evan didn't think this strange; he couldn't think of one sentient being who would have liked the name Shlongbungpuz, except maybe the person who gave it to the poor owl – Evan would have bet all his pocket money on suspicious 'shrooms being involved, had someone asked him). He was too old for any trip that required more than a half a day's flight, but he was usually reliable on short distances.

Coaxing him out of his cage, Evan gave him the letter, instructed him on where to deliver it, fed him an owl treat, then sent him flying through the window. With that done, he returned to his room, pulled out the book he'd gotten from Mr Ollivander, and settled himself on his bed to read until dinnertime.

* * *

July 31st dawned sunny and warm, and Harry was up with the sun, something very unusual for him. Today, he'd even gotten up before Sirius, and was in the kitchen by the time the owl brought the Daily Prophet. He gave the owl five Knuts and skimmed through the back section of the paper, searching for any jokes or interesting stories.

Sirius joined him in the kitchen some fifteen minutes after this, running a hand through his dishevelled hair and looking slightly worse for wear.

"When did you get back last night?" Harry asked him, instantly curious.

"Not before two. Some idiot thought it funny to test out some custom-made Dark magical artefacts on Muggles. Mostly magical originally, but he charmed the weirdest Muggle things, too; a music box that plays this creepy but catchy melody, this disgustingly green monkey thing, and an ugly purple dil– ehm, right, never mind that one. Anyway, nearly gave us the slip, too, but we caught him. Sorry for missing dinner, kiddo, but this case was a killer, and I still have all the paperwork to do, as well."

Harry didn't really mind. Saying his guardian – _de facto_ Da, though not his father (no, his father always was and will be James Potter, and both child and guardian agreed on that point) – worked for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as an Auror was worth every missed dinner and long day left to his own devices.

"Nah, it's ok. Remus stayed with me after our lessons, anyway. He promised to come with us to Diagon Alley today."

At that, Sirius smacked his own forehead. In three steps, he was by Harry's chair, pulling him into a tight hug.

"Happy birthday, Harry."

"Thanks," he replied into his guardian's house robes, grinning like a loon. It was his birthday today. He was eleven – finally – and he was going to get a wand! For his birthday!

After a good minute, during which Harry had a feeling Sirius was in one of those moods – when he thought of his dad and mum, and the 'good old days' – Milby popped in with breakfast, so Sirius seated himself at his customary seat at the head of the table and dug in as eagerly as Harry.

"What did Moony say, when will he be meeting us?"

"He said around noon," Harry replied after swallowing. "We can have lunch at the Leaky Cauldron with him after we finish our shopping."

"Yeah, that sounds great," Sirius confirmed, leafing through the newspapers. "Did he ask you what you wanted for your birthday?" No doubt the papers were to hide his grin.

"He _always_ does that!" Harry moaned, slumping in his seat. "I don't get it! He's known me since forever! He knows what I like and don't like; why does he always ask me that?!"

"What did you tell him?"

"That I wanted a book on Quidditch. Yes, I know he already got me one, and I remembered he doesn't have much money," he confirmed pre-emptively, knowing already what Sirius would say next. Really, it was hardly his fault he tended to forget money was a point of concern for most families. Not that he flaunted his and Sirius' wealth in front of everyone, it was just that money was very rarely on his mind when he spoke with others, so Sirius kept constantly reminding him to think of it before talking about, for instance, his new broom that was by now three years old or his custom-made formal robes that he hated anyway. And really, for someone as childish as Sirius Black, it was amazing how much emphasis he put on the whole money thing. "I just wish he could surprise me, for once. That's the whole point of a birthday, isn't it?"

"I suppose it is. But, Remus was like that in school, too, always afraid he'd mess it up."

"I'm not sure you actually _can_ mess up a birthday present," Harry replied dubiously.

"Trust me, kiddo, you sure can. My parents regularly sent me Howlers for my birthday after I was sorted into Gryffindor."

"Your parents were horrible people, Sirius," Harry said, wrinkling his nose. Sirius rarely spoke of his parents, and never with kind words. Regulus spoke of them about as much as Sirius did, but he was more reserved in his comments. Even so, Harry was sure glad Sirius hadn't wanted to go to his mother's funeral six years ago. He'd spent the night afterwards with Regulus, both drinking themselves into oblivion, while Remus had watched over Harry and Alya, Regulus' daughter, so that Mrs Black could take care of the two brothers.

"They are dead, and good riddance. Let's not ruin a perfectly fine day talking about them. Give me two hours to get myself presentable and check in with the office, and we'll go."

They got to Diagon Alley around eleven-thirty, Apparating directly to it, and after giving Harry a moment to collect himself and stop the queasy feeling in his stomach, the little family of two joined the throng of people hurrying up and down the wizarding shopping district. Their immediate stop was Gringotts, as Sirius really didn't carry enough money they would be requiring today.

The first person to recognise them was Rubeus Hagrid, the Groundskeeper of Hogwarts and an old friend of Sirius', a man towering over the moving mass around him by a good few feet, and wide enough to make it uncomfortably crowded in his general vicinity. He stood by the steps of Gringotts, the pink umbrella Sirius had always mentioned curiously nowhere in sight, tangled beard and a mane of hair hiding most of his face, but his beady black eyes were smiling.

"Sirius!" he bellowed as soon as he noticed them. "I din't think I'd see yeh here. And Harry. Las' time I saw yeh, yeh was only a baby." Harry smiled politely at him, wondering when in the world he'd ever seen him. He knew of the man, but he'd never actually met him. "Yeh look jus' like yer dad, but yeh've got yer mum's eyes."

"Yeah, everyone always tells me that," he confirmed proudly.

"Ah, but yeh prob'ly don' remember me. Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts."

"Harry Potter, nice to... see you again?" It came out as a half-question, half-statement, but Hagrid confirmed it swiftly enough with a nod that had his hair flying wildly around his head, and barged on.

"So, what yer two doin' out here today, then?"

"Shopping for school supplies," Sirius replied, grinning. "Harry's coming to Hogwarts this year, Hagrid, I'm sure you know that."

"We just got here, so we're going to the bank," Harry filled in, shifting from foot to foot in his excitement. "It's only my second time riding down to the vaults." He'd been to Gringotts only once, three years ago, when Sirius had had to sort out some paperwork with the Potter vault, and Harry's presence, as the only Potter left, had been required. From what he remembered, it was about as wicked as flying on a broom, and he'd been looking forward to it all morning.

"As a matter o' fact, I gotta visit Gringotts too. Fer Dumbledore. Hogwarts business," Hagrid said, voice and posture showing pride. "He usually gets me ter do important stuff fer him. Gettin' things from Gringotts – knows he can trust me, see."

"I've never in my life doubted that," Sirius assured him as the three walked up the steps and into the goblin-run establishment. "I hear your examination passed excellently."

"Yeah, 'n Ollivander even fixed my old wand right up!"

"Examination?" Harry piped up.

"Hagrid never finished Hogwarts, you see – had a spot of trouble with illegal magical creatures, but I'll let him tell you that story himself some time – and so he took a special set of exams to be allowed to practice magic," Sirius explained, making Harry frown a little in thought. He sort of knew that Hagrid wasn't allowed to do magic – hadn't been now, apparently – but he'd thought that rather stupid from the start, so this wasn't too exciting news.

"Congratulations, Hagrid," he said congenially, earning himself what looked like a smile from the half-giant.

"Thank yer, Harry. Mind, I'm still restricted 'bout some magic, but I can do mos' now."

Inside the bank, Sirius led the way, approaching a free goblin behind a counter, with Harry right behind him and Hagrid crowding the back. The goblin gave each of them a scrutinising glance, before turning to Sirius, no doubt deciding him the person of greatest integrity.

"Good morning. We're here to collect some money out of my vault. Sirius Black. Here's my key."

The goblin took it from Sirius and inspected if, before nodding.

"This looks to be in order."

"I've also got a letter here from Perfessor Dumbledore," Hagrid cut in, throwing out his chest and pulling the letter out of one of his numerous pockets. "It's about You-Know-What in vault seven hundred and thirteen."

While the goblin read through the letter, Harry inspected first Hagrid, who was still standing rather proudly beside him, and then Sirius, who seemed annoyed by the half-giant, most likely for the general lack of tact he was displaying by speaking of some secret thing or other so loudly.

"Very well," the goblin acquiesced, handing the letter back once he'd finished reading. "I will have someone take you down to both vaults. Griphook!"

Harry wanted to ask what was in vault seven hundred and thirteen, but one look at Sirius had him keeping his mouth shut. He wasn't quite sure if his guardian knew anything about it, but either way, he would not let Hagrid tell him anything, even if the man was willing. So, instead, Harry followed Griphook, the goblin assigned to them, down to the stone passageway that sloped steeply downwards, and that was the beginning of the rail tracks. They barely managed to fit into the cart, yet another thing that seemed to annoy Sirius, but the moment they started moving, Harry didn't care one spittle for either man.

The ride was as exhilarating as he remembered it the first time, and he had little problem keeping his eyes open against the biting wind – his glasses had protection for that, since he flew on a broom so much. He caught a glimpse of a dragon on one turn, and was nearly sprayed by the water of the passing lake on another. With a loony grin, he decided this ride was better than any roller coaster he'd ridden at Gardaland (two years ago for his birthday, after Lupin had mentioned it and Harry had convinced the two to take him). It even almost topped flying on a broom, which was a shock of its own.

When they rode over an underground ravine, Harry peered over the edge, trying to distinguish anything in the darkness beneath, and ignoring the way Sirius' fingers tangled in his shirt on the back. Unfortunately, all Harry could see were his own puffs of breath, as the air became colder and colder.

When they finally arrived, Hagrid, looking very peaky and green, stumbled out of the cart and leaned against the wall, obviously trying not to be sick. Harry and Sirius, on the other hand, had matching grins on their faces. The ride had been adrenalin-inducing, and now that they were deep enough that the air had become warm again, even the lingering discomfort of high speed was vanishing quickly. They left Hagrid to collect himself and followed Griphook to the door of Sirius' vault. The goblin inserted the key and turned it, before pulling it out and running one of his long fingers gently over the door, which melted away in front of them.

The pile of gold inside was substantial, and Harry allowed himself to gape a bit as Sirius walked in and collected however much money he thought they'd need.

"Mind you," he said to Harry as the door rematerialised behind him once he stepped out, "Reg's got primary access to the family vault, it's down below next to the Lestranges', has all the creepy Dark objects my family was so fond of collecting, but if anything should ever happen to me, I've arranged for my funds to be transferred into your vault instead of back into the Black one."

"Why don't you have access to the Black Vault?" Harry asked with a frown as Griphook led the three of them down the narrow ledge pathway to the vault two doors down, that Hagrid was to visit. "You're older."

"I am, but my parents disowned me when I ran off to go live with your old man – you know that – and by the time everyone else in the direct family line except me and Reggie dropped dead, I had plenty of money of my own – I told you once about my late Uncle Alphard, he's the one who'd had Milby before us. Reg insisted on giving me my half of the monetary inheritance, but I had no wish to deal with the _other_ inheritance." By the emphasis he placed on the word 'other', Harry took it to mean the Dark Objects he'd mentioned before.

The door to the vault seven hundred and thirteen was identical to the one of the vault seven hundred and eleven, with one exception – it had no keyhole. Griphook repeated the procedure (minus the whole key part), and the door melted away.

"So, what would happen if someone who wasn't allowed tried to open these kinds of doors?" Harry asked the goblin as he peered into the surprisingly empty room.

"They'd be sucked through the door and trapped in there," Griphook replied importantly.

"And how often do you check to see if anyone's inside?"

"About once every ten years." The grin on the goblin's face was downright nasty, but Harry barely noticed it from the curiosity that started burning the moment he caught sight of the grubby little package wrapped up in brown paper Hagrid had picked up and tucked deep inside his coat.

"Can I try it?"

The looks he got from all three adults made him grin innocently.

"What? I was just wondering if it was more like Apparition or Portkey."

The ride back (after having to listen to Griphook's grumblings about children and annoying vault owners) was as exciting as the ride down, and Hagrid looked just as green when they arrived back to the surface. There they bid farewell to the half-giant and proceeded down the street, stopping occasionally for some wizard or other to shake Harry's hand and thank him for something he hadn't actually done. It might have even bothered him, had he not considered their congratulations, however unknowingly, directed at his mother. As it was, he graciously thanked them and moved on.

They decided to make _Madam Malkin_ _'_ _s Robes for All Occasions_ their first stop. Sirius perused the adult section as Madam Malkin gave Harry a smile and directed him towards a stool in the back, where, to his immediate displeasure, he found Draco Malfoy.

He'd never met the other boy; while Regulus kept up on most Slytherin acquaintances he had (including their cousin Narcissa), Sirius had no such compunction, being himself the black sheep of the family and a Gryffindor. That didn't mean Harry wasn't involved with the wizarding politics, or ignorant of the wizarding elite. Lucius Malfoy, the boy's father, was very influential in the Ministry, and Sirius always complained to Remus about the fact that the man was pushing the Pure-blood propaganda at every turn. Ron was the only other Pure-blood Harry had constant contact with (Neville Longbottom was an occasional playmate outside of that one year he'd lived with Harry when they were very, very little, but for the most part, the boy was too shy to be able to suffer someone as boisterous as Harry for very long), and they'd both long ago found that their opinions on Slytherin Death Eaters coincided, and that Lucius Malfoy was one of the biggest of the lot. Consequently, Harry already had a low opinion of the other boy.

That opinion did not improve one iota when the boy deigned to notice him and open his mouth.

"Hogwarts, too?"

"Yes," Harry confirmed, wondering how long it would take the blond to realise whom he was speaking with. Sirius kept Harry well out of public eye – that was why he usually only hung out with Alya Black and the Weasleys – but he felt entitled to be insulted if the boy didn't even grasp the fact that he was speaking with the Boy Who Lived.

"My father's next door buying my books and Mother's up the street looking at wands," said Malfoy in a bored, drawling voice, as if the two were his servants, rather than parents. Harry raised his eyebrow, but let the other talk. "Then I'm going to drag them off to look at racing brooms. I don't see why first-years can't have their own. I think I'll bully father into getting me one and I'll smuggle it in somehow."

Yup, his first impression was spot on – snotty, pampered and spoiled.

"Have _you_ got your own broom?"

"Yes," he replied shortly, not feeling very inclined to argue right at that moment – his mood was too good (a wand, he was getting his own wand today). Unfortunately, he couldn't very well blow the snotty little Slytherin-wannabe off.

"Play Quidditch at all?"

"Naturally, my father was a Chaser."

"I do too," Malfoy confirmed with a self-important smile that made Harry want to roll his eyes. "Father says it's a crime if I'm not picked to play for my house, and I must say, I agree. Know what house you'll be in yet?"

"Do you?"

"Slytherin, all our family have been – imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"

"I'd have thought you'd feel that way about Gryffindor," Harry replied smugly. In response, Malfoy snorted.

"That would never happen."

"I imagine not," Harry agreed. "It would be such a disgrace, after all, to have you in my house, so it's a good thing you're not nearly worthy enough of Gryffindor."

The other boy spluttered indignantly, while Harry openly grinned, thinking _Potter: one, Malfoy: zero_.

Sirius chose that moment to walk back towards the front of the store and into their view, though his smile vanished quickly enough when he saw whose company Harry was forced to endure. For his part, Malfoy seemed to recognise a relative much more easily than a celebrity, because his eyes flew first to Sirius' face, then to Harry's forehead.

"Harry Potter, I presume," he said, suddenly sounding succinate. "Draco Malfoy."

"I'd have thought your father managed to educate you enough to recognise me without my godfather, Malfoy," Harry replied, inwardly disgusted at the other boy's blatant attempt to suck up to him. "But then, I suspect that isn't Lucius Malfoy's fault. You do seem too occupied by your broom to be aware of worthier things."

"Is that so?" Malfoy replied, going straight back to indignant and malicious. Good, Harry preferred him that way. He hated how much Slytherins loved pretending they were something other than what they actually were. "And your miraculous survival trick makes you a worthier thing than my broom?" He sounded truly incredulous.

"In case you haven't heard before, I am the Boy Who Lived," Harry pointed out blithely. "As in, I lived, while Voldemort died. You remember, the guy your father claimed had Imperiused him?"

"And yet, my father is both the confidante to the Minister of Magic and is on the Board of Governors of Hogwarts, while your guardian is nothing but a disowned blood-traitor who occupies his time picking kittens out of trees for elderly witches."

Fury flushed Harry's system at that, and he clenched his fists tightly.

"At least Sirius isn't ashamed of what he really believes in," he hissed back. "He has no need to suck up to the Minister of Magic – oh, that's right, that's actually _former_ Minster of Magic, innit? – he's perfectly happy being an Auror, a profession only a Slytherin would be stupid enough to belittle."

"You're done for," Madam Malkin said in that moment, looking disapproving of their argument but obviously deciding not to get in the middle of it. Harry gladly took the offered way out and, jumping off the stool, took his robe off. Without a second glance towards the snotty blond, he joined Sirius and, two minutes later, they were back in Diagon Alley, blinking in the harsh sunlight.

"What did he want?" Sirius asked as they walked up the street.

"To brag about daddy dearest and climb up my arse once he finally realised who I was. He called you a blood-traitor," Harry nearly growled in agitation.

"I take it you handled him?"

"Am I, or am I not, the Marauders' kid?"

"Good boy," Sirius replied with a wide grin. "Let him learn not to mess with one of us."

 _Ollivanders_ was their next stop, because right before they'd Apparated, Sirius had gotten a Floo-call asking that he return to the office in the afternoon. While both had been very unhappy about it, they'd managed to compromise by having Sirius go with him until Remus was available, and that the other Marauder would take over after lunch. Due to this little inconvenience, what Sirius had obviously planned for last had to be moved up, so _Ollivanders_ it was.

The shop was dusty and small, shelves covering every wall and filled with thousands upon thousands of narrow boxes. Magic was clearly discernible in the air, making the back of Harry's neck tingle in much the same way as during the Quidditch World Cup last year.

"Good morning," a soft voice said, and, had he not grown up with a man whose idea of fun was pranking his own ward, Harry would have jumped.

"Hello," Harry replied with a smile when he noticed the old shop proprietor.

"Ah yes. Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter. You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wand. Ten inches, hazel and unicorn hair, barely swishy." Mr Ollivander stepped closer, unblinking and almost seeing inside Harry, who shifted on his feet. "Your father, on the other hand, favoured a mahogany wand with unicorn hair core. Eleven inches, pliable. Excellent for transfiguration. Well, I say your father favoured it – it's really the wand that chooses the wizard."

Harry knew both of those wands, of course. After his parents' death, Sirius had placed them in his vault, rather than have them buried with his parents, as some families did, and Harry had inspected both when he'd been to the vault. His mother's wand had felt like a dying thing and had made him weepy. His father's had liked him a little better, but had stung his hand when he'd thought to sneak it out of the vault without Sirius knowing.

By now Mr Ollivander was close enough they were almost nose to nose, and his hand came up to brush the hair away from Harry's forehead, where a jagged lightning-bolt scar carved it. Harry nearly shivered.

"And that's where... I'm sorry to say I sold the wand that did it. Thirteen and a half inches. Yew. Powerful wand, very powerful, and in the wrong hands... Well, if I'd known what that wand was going out into the world to do..."

Sirius' cough made the old man turn his attention away from Harry, thankfully. Mr Ollivander straightened up and smiled as he stepped away slightly.

"Sirius Black! Pleasure to see you again... Spruce and phoenix feather, fifteen inches, barely bendy, wasn't it?"

"That's the one," Sirius confirmed with a cocky smile. "Still as good as the first day."

"Well, I'm pleased to hear it," Mr Ollivander said, nodding lightly. "Well, then, Mr Potter, let us find you a perfect wand. Which is your wand arm?"

"I'm right-handed."

"Hold out your arm. That's it." The tape measure started flying around him, and Harry eyed it with interest. It had a jerky sort of movement, tensing every time it moved to another part of his body. "Have you tried your parents' wand, Mr Potter?"

"Once," Harry admitted. "But it was a while ago. They didn't seem to like me very much."

"No, I should think not. The wand chooses the wizard, Mr Potter, and most wands get very attached to their first owners. That is why you will never get such good results with another wizard's wand, and why it is best to buy a new one. That will do."

The tape measure rolled up and fell to the floor noiselessly as Mr Ollivander walked back to the counter, carrying a load of boxes with him. He opened one and offered its contents to Harry. "Right then, Mr Potter. Try this one. Ash and dragon heartstring. Nine and a half inches. Nice and flexible. Just try it and give it a wave."

Harry did as he was told, but Mr Ollivander snatched the wand out of his hand before he'd had the time to do anything more than raise it into the air.

"Maple and phoenix feather. Seven inches. Quite whippy."

That, too, was taken out of his hand before he could do anything with it.

"No, no. Try this – cypress and unicorn hair, ten inches, slightly bendy."

And so on it went. The pile of tried and discarded wands grew bigger and bigger, while the pile of untried wands Mr Ollivander had brought in was quickly dwindling into nothing. For his part, Harry was partly extremely pleased and partly slightly afraid – pleased, because Mr Ollivander's gaze steadily became more and more delighted as time progressed, and afraid, because the thought that no wand would choose him flitted through his mind more and more often with each failure. Sirius didn't seem the least bit bothered by this, however; if anything, he looked to be having the time of his life watching various things happen. With some wands, there was nothing, not even a little spark. With others, things flew off the shelves and furniture rattled. One had even shot fire when Harry had lifted it. Sirius' quick reflexes had come in very useful then, and he'd actually laughed at Harry's sheepish expression.

"Tricky customer, eh? Not to worry, we'll find the perfect match here somewhere," Mr Ollivander was muttering loudly as he scanned the shelves in the back. "I wonder, now... yes, why not. Unusual combination..." He walked back to them with a box, holding it out for Harry. "Holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches, nice and supple."

The warmth that spread through Harry's hand as he held it made him instantly smile. Red and gold sparks shot out of it when he swished it through the air, and Sirius' grin was positively doggish.

"Oh, bravo!" Mr Ollivander cried in delight. "Yes, indeed, oh, very good. Well, well, well... how curious... how very curious..." He kept muttering the same thing as he packed the wand for them.

"What is curious?" Sirius asked, cocking his head, grey eyes studying the other man.

"I remember every wand I've ever sold, Mr Black," Mr Ollivander replied with great levity. "Every single wand. It so happens that the phoenix whose tail feather is in Mr Potter's wand gave another feather – just one other." He turned to Harry, whose stomach was scrunched up in excitement. Whatever the man was going to say, the eleven-year-old was sure it would be profound. "It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand, when its brother... why, its brother gave you that scar."

Harry's hand flew up to his forehead, and his eyes widened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sirius' face darken.

"Yes, thirteen and a half inches. Yew. Curious indeed how these things happen. I think we must expect great things from you, Mr Potter... After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great."

"If you consider torturing and killing innocents great," Sirius growled low in his throat. Mr Ollivander eyed him with a very interesting expression on his face that Harry couldn't really identify.

"It would be foolish to discount the magic that was performed with that wand on account of your personal feelings for its owner," Mr Ollivander admonished softly, before seemingly retreating from that train of thought. "That would be seven Galleons, Mr Black."

It was Sirius this time whose mood was dark as they exited the store. Personally, Harry felt very proud of his own wand, and its history. So who cared if its brother had given Harry the scar, had killed his parents? Harry's life had always been connected to Voldemort; yet another connection didn't shake him in the least. He actually considered it right appropriate, not that he would have said so in present company. Sirius was too stormy to take it well.

Luckily, Lupin was outside the shop when they stepped into the street. Like Sirius before, he gave Harry a one-sided hug, smiling down at him.

"Happy birthday, Harry."

"Thanks, Moony!" he said excitedly. "I got my wand!"

"Did you, now? And, are you satisfied?"

"Yup! I'll show it to you at the Leaky Cauldron. It even has a history and everything!"

"A history? Aren't Ollivander's wands new?"

"The feather is from the same phoenix as the one in old Moldyshorts' wand," Sirius replied darkly, and in response, Remus' expression fell slightly. But, he brightened back up again in no time, patting Harry on the shoulder slightly.

"Well, I'm sure that makes no difference, Harry. If it chose you, it will fit you perfectly, just like all the wands Ollivander always sells."

"Yup," Harry agreed, skipping slightly as they walked towards the tavern. " _I_ 'm not bothered at all." He gave Sirius a pointed glare, before returning his attention to Remus. "So, do you need to get anything for yourself today?"

The lunch was a relatively pleasant affair. Tom the keeper had given them a secluded table in the far corner, from which Sirius could observe the whole room, and no one could easily notice Harry if they weren't looking for him. Sirius and Remus regaled him with stories about their time as the Marauders, telling him of the instances when they'd snuck around after curfew, exploring the castle for a pet project of theirs, and how they'd barely managed to evade Filch, the old caretaker, more than once.

"You'll have to find out if Filch still has that map of ours, Harry," Sirius said when Harry asked him what happened to that project of theirs. "He managed to confiscate it from us two days before graduation, and we never got a chance to get it back. It'll be more than useful to you."

"Don't encourage him, Padfoot," Remus chided lightly. "The last thing Hogwarts needs is a second generation of Marauders."

Sirius's response was a laugh, and they'd moved on to other things. On their way back to Diagon Alley after lunch, Harry was once again stopped by various wizards and witches wishing to shake his hand and meet him – it seemed that in the confines of the Leaky Cauldron, it was easier for them to spot Harry. Remus looked uncomfortable with it, but, as before, Harry only indulged the people with grace.

The last one to walk up to them was a nervous pale man who looked about Sirius' and Remus' age. One of his eyes was twitching, and he stuttered quite badly when he talked.

"P-P-Potter, c-can't t-tell you how p-pleased I am to m-meet you."

"Merlin, Quirinus, whatever happened to you?" Sirius asked, eyebrows raised high on his forehead.

"S-Sirius, R-Remus," the man greeted, looking very, very uncomfortable, and Remus jumped in with his own comment, Harry guessed to alleviate the man's nerves.

"Harry, Professor Quirrell teaches at Hogwarts," he explained. "Muggle Studies, if I remember correctly? No, wait, that class was one of the ones restructured a few years back. Studies in Technology, right?"

"D-Defence Against the D-D-Dark Arts," Professor Quirrell muttered, and Harry's nose involuntarily scrunched up at the thought. "P-Professor D-Dumbledore offered me t-the p-post."

"Can't imagine why," Sirius commented, looking at him rather pityingly. "You were always more of an academic, Quirinus."

"I'm sure he has adequate experience," Remus said, shooting Sirius a stern look.

"Y-Yes. It was an honour t-to be o-offered the p-post."

"Good luck, then. Harry, we should be going now; we do still have quite a bit to get you."

"Sure," Harry agreed, feeling very relieved and quite a bit disappointed. He'd hoped their DADA teacher would be someone who at least seemed like he knew what he was doing. But then, he decided brightly as he studied Remus's slightly haggard clothes and scars, appearances could certainly be deceiving.

"He's a total wreck," Sirius commented as they joined the throng once again and started walking towards the Apparition point.

"How do you know him?"

"He was in school when we were," Sirius explained. "A few years older; Alice Longbottom's generation. Not even his own house thought he'd amount to much, and that's saying something, considering he always had his head buried in his books, like a good Ravenclaw. Never stuttered before, though."

"Don't be too hard on him, Padfoot," Remus said. "Last I heard, he had a nasty run-in with a hag somewhere on the continent."

"And he's to teach Harry any Defence?" Sirius snorted. "You know what, Prongslet, I'm going with you through those spells ASAP, because there is no way you'd learn anything from him."

Sirius stopped with them at _Flourish and Blotts_ , where he got Harry Vindictus Viridian's _Curses and Counter-Curses (Bewitch your Friends and Befuddle your Enemies with the Latest Revenge: Hair Loss, Jelly-Legs, Tongue-Tying and much, much more)_ , looking almost as delighted as Harry felt to see that this was a brand new edition. Remus only gave them an indulgent smile and reminded Harry that they'd come here to get him school books. Sirius took the books with him when he Disapparated, freeing their hands for other things they'd have to buy.

One stop later, Harry owned a brand new cauldron and a students' potions ingredients kit. To his slight surprise, their next stop was _Snape_ _'_ _s and Evans_ _'_ _Potions and Charms_ , a neat little shop nestled between _Twillfit and Tattings_ and _The Junk Shop_. There was a variety of different objects flying or levitating in the air when they entered it, and the shelves in the back were stacked with phials of various sizes containing a variety of differently-coloured liquids and pastes.

The woman leaning over what looked like a large, lightly glowing ball on the counter was a familiar sight to Harry, and when she recognised them, her smile lit up her face.

"Remus!" She exclaimed, abandoning whatever she was working on to step from behind the counter and hug the man. "Didn't know you'd come by today! It's so good to see you."

"You too, Lily," he greeted back.

"Hi, Mrs Snape," Harry said with a smile, pleased beyond measure when she gave him a hug, as well.

"Harry. How are you? Happy birthday."

"Thank you! I'm great; we're shopping for school supplies."

"Are you excited?"

"Yeah, I can't wait," he confirmed with a broad grin.

"Harry, give me a minute, and we can go get you that birthday present I promised," Remus said, looking down rather significantly at him. Obediently, Harry wandered away, and his eyes fell on another boy sitting in the far corner of the room. His legs were up on the edges of his chair, and his head was nearly buried in the book on his knees.

Harry had met the other boy only once (that he remembered, anyway; he thought he must have met him as a baby, since the boy's mum was friends with Sirius and Remus), and he had absolutely no interest in chatting him up. He was sullen and completely obsessed with potions, and his hair always looked greasy as it hung in his face, giving him an overall unhealthy and dirty appearance. While Malfoy was the fake side of the Slytherin that tried to deceive everyone with looks and manners, Snape was the real face of it, sneaky, underhanded and devious. Of the two, Harry personally preferred the Snapes of the world, but not by much, and only because they didn't try to suck up to him for personal gain like the Malfoys, only to stab him in the back first chance they got.

Cold voices made Harry turn back to the counter, where a man looking uncannily like the boy in the corner stood, distaste on his face. He looked like he barely tolerated Remus in the shop, and Harry knew this wasn't far from the truth – he'd heard plenty of stories about 'Snivellus' and his fascination for the Dark Arts from Sirius to know what kind of man that was. He agreed fully with his guardian that Lily Evans could have found a better husband, especially taking into consideration that her son had turned out just like his father.

A moderately large wooden box on the counter was closed with a bang, giving Harry only one little moment in which to notice its insides were filled with large vials. Remus lifted it and tucked it away in his pocket just as Harry wandered back.

"Thank you, Severus," he replied cordially, if somewhat stiffly. The dark man eyed him with a menacing expression, looking dark and unapproachable. It only made Harry stand straighter in defiance.

"Your father's son, aren't you, Potter?" the voice was silky and low, sounding by far more dangerous than Sirius usually did when he was enraged. And that voice told him that the words were meant as a great insult. In response, Harry crossed his arms over his chest.

"Yes, sir, and proud of it."

"Sev," Mrs Snape said softly, placing her hand on the man's forearm, while Remus guided Harry towards the exit.

"I'll see you next week for our lunch date, Lily. Severus."

"Give my regards to Sirius, please," she replied, and they were out of the shop. Their mood lifted with distance, and Harry eyed his companion with great interest, wondering if those potions were exactly what he thought they were. Not that he'd ever ask Remus about it, but it seemed strange that the man would get something as important as the Wolfsbane Potion from someone who obviously hated him, even if the man's wife was Remus' friend.

But such thoughts quickly fled Harry's head when he grasped that Remus was leading him to the _Eeylops Owl Emporium_ , and dread settled into his stomach. He still wasn't sure this was a good idea, not at all.

"If you'd rather not, that's fine, Harry," Remus assured him, and Harry shook his head, marshalling his courage. Sirius thought this was a good idea, and that was enough in Harry's mind. He was a Gryffindor (or he would be, in any case, if the Marauders were to be believed) after all.

The shop was dark and full of strange sounds of rustling and hooting.

"Pick whichever you like best," Remus said, pushing him lightly towards the stack and stacks of cages that held owls of all shapes and sizes. There were barn owls and screech owls, brown owls and towny owls, there were enormous eagle owls and tiny elf owls, there were owls with heart-shaped faces and owls with big ears, owls that were sleeping and owls that observed him with great interest. There were black owls, brown owls, grey owls, owls with spots, owls with stripes.

And in the very back, hidden somewhat out of sight, Harry caught a flash of white. Instantly drawn to it, his nervousness dissolving with his curiosity, he approached the group of cages. The moment he saw the owl, all his anxiety flew out the window.

She was a magnificent snowy owl, with golden eyes that observed him intelligently, and when he stuck a finger through the metal bars (completely ignoring the shop-keeper's warning not to do it), she nipped at it almost playfully. Her feathers were soft as a cloud, and they weren't much darker, either. He didn't know too much about owls, but he did know that females were bigger than males, and it was clear which of the two genders she was.

"You want to come with me, girl?" he asked the owl, absolutely enchanted with her. In response, she hooted and butted his finger with her head.

"Is that the one you want?" Remus asked from above him, and Harry gave him a happy smile as he looked up at his upside-down face. "She is beautiful."

"She is, isn't she?"

"I think she'll be a great familiar," Remus said honestly as the shop-keeper carefully took her cage out and placed it into Harry's waiting arms. "Happy birthday, Prongslet."

"You mean..." Harry gasped, eyes wide.

"You got your wand from Sirius, and I do seem to recall you like surprises."

"Thank you, Moony!"

"Just take good care of her, that'll be thanks enough."

"I will," he promised with conviction, to both his new owl and his honorary uncle. "I'll take very good care of her."

"I know you will."

"And... I think I'll call her..." Harry dragged the r sound as he considered this very important point as the shop proprietor took the snowy owl to the counter for Remus to pay for, "...Cybèle."

"French?" Remus asked absentmindedly, and Harry nodded.

"Yup; after Cybèle Peltier, the French National Team Seeker. Remember, she gave me her autograph at the World Cup last year after they introduced the Canadians?"

"Sirius will be thrilled," the older wizard noted with a slight smirk, to which Harry answered in kind, wrinkling his nose lightly in amusement.

"I know. That's half the point."

"Sometimes, Prongslet, you're even worse than James ever was."

Harry took it for a compliment as he hugged the newly-named Cybèle's cage in his arms.

After that, Remus let Harry wander _Quality Quidditch Supplies_. He spent some money on new flying gloves and gawked at the Nimbus Two-Thousand. His broom was about three years old, and it was in very good condition – next to his wand now, it was the thing he valued most – but it still couldn't compare with the newest model. Remus bought him the supplies he needed to refill his reparation kit, reading from a piece of parchment with Sirius' flowing handwriting. When he'd had his fill for the day, the two Apparated back to Sundance Street.

Yet another surprise waited for Harry there – when they entered, about a dozen people yelled out 'happy birthday' from the living room, and a big chocolate cake with eleven candles resided on the coffee table right in front of their fireplace. Most of the people present were his father's acquaintances, but the youngest four Weasleys were there, as well as the stern Augusta Longbottom with her clumsy grandson Neville, whose parents had been good friends with Harry's and whose birthday they were also celebrating (and whose shy smile and happy eyes made Harry smile in return, the momentary jealousy of it not being _his_ moment vanishing into smoke)ishi , the eighteen-year-old Dora Tonks with Andy and Ted, her parents, Sirius' favourite relations, and Alya Black, Harry's almost cousin. He didn't see Regulus, but that didn't surprise him too much – most people weren't aware that the two Black brothers were on very good terms.

For the rest of the day, Harry was surrounded by people he considered friends, laughing and playing Exploding Snap and Gobstones, trying to guess what Tonks was emulating with her Metamorphmagus abilities, retelling Quidditch matches and guessing what it would be like to finally go to Hogwarts. Smaller groups emerged as the day wore on – Harry, Ron, Fred and George escaped to the Sundance Street treasure, a wizard-spaced attic where they could play pick-up Quidditch, while Neville, Ginny and Alya remained in conversation about Hogwarts, and Tonks joined Sirius, Remus, Lily Snape, Emmeline Vance, Sturgis Podmore, Kingsley Shacklebolt (who'd been the one to supposedly require Sirius back at the office – an obvious lie in hindsight, so that he could come organise the surprise birthday party) and Hestia Jones in a lively discussion about the possible changes in the ministry that the new Minister for Magic, Dorcas Meadowes, was bound to implement, leaving the older generation consisting of Augusta Longbottom, Ted and Andromeda Tonks and Arthur and Molly Weasley speaking of the old witch's son and his wife, their condition still little improved even after ten years, and the two children of the two couples, who had graduated Hogwarts the previous year and were well on their way to fulfilling their aspirations for the future – Nymphadora had already been accepted into the Auror Training Program, while Charlie had secured himself a job on a Romanian dragon reserve.

By the time everyone left, Harry could barely keep his eyes open, and the smile on his face never left him. He'd had birthday parties before, but most of the time, they were simply visits to the Burrow, where Mrs Weasley was allowed to fuss over him and they all ate her delicious cake and flew on their brooms. Last year, he'd accompanied Regulus and his family to the Quidditch World Cup in France, and the year before, he'd celebrated it with Remus and Sirius with a trip to Gardaland Amusement Park in Italy. This, however, was the first time everyone had come to his home, and even though there were only three new faces present in his sphere of interest, he considered it the best birthday he'd ever had.


	4. Ch 3: The Old Acquaintances and the New

**Chapter 3: The Old Acquaintances and the New**

It was ten-thirty on September 1st when Evan got off the tube at King's Cross station with his parents. His father didn't care much for Muggle transportation or technology in general, but his mother, being Muggle-born and maintaining connections with childhood friends, usually insisted that they do things the Muggle way, especially when she was occupied with charming Muggle objects and trying to make them work for wizards, as she was now. Evan himself rather enjoyed the tube, when it wasn't too crowded. As it was, Sunday mornings people usually slept late, so they'd had a comfortable journey.

The Hogwarts Express was already there when they passed the hidden barrier to the Station 9¾, and Evan wasted no time in finding himself an empty compartment. His mother came inside with him, where she enlarged his trunk and placed Stheno's carrier on top of it, letting Stheno out to climb onto Evn's shoulders and wrap her bushy tail tightly around his throat. The juvenile Kneazle seemed perfectly content to be jostled around as he weaved around the students, and observing everything from her perch.

Having found himself a seat and disembarked the train, Evan returned to his father's side with his mother, where he found the man in deep conversation with Regulus Black, the man's ten-year-old daughter beside him.

Regulus Black was a relatively handsome man Evan's parents' age, with lustrous black hair and steely grey eyes, both of which Alya had inherited. He held himself like a proud aristocrat who was well aware of the power his position brought, and he behaved accordingly. Still, in the privacy of their home, Regulus was usually warm and even indulgent from time to time, and Evan was smart enough to understand that appearances could be deceiving.

Alya was shorter than Evan by about half a head. Her facial lines were regal, framed by black hair that was always half-braided away from her face, with the rest falling in voluminous waves to her waist, and her eyes were grey with blue of the clear, icy-winter sky blooming from around her irises, making them look piercing and ethereal. She held herself in much the same way her father did, though Evan knew that was only conditioning. In reality, Alya was soft-spoken and unobtrusive, with a great interest in academics and great tolerance for almost everyone.

He greeted her father first, before wandering to her and giving her a small smile. Stheno leaned slightly over to rub her cheek against Alya's in greeting, before settling back on Evan's shoulder.

"I didn't expect to see you here," he commented lightly as Alya raised her hand to pet the Kneazle.

"Father had business to discuss with Mr Snape, and Uncle Sirius is supposed to be here, as well."

In response, Evan raised his eyebrow.

"Don't tell me you're here to see Harry Potter?"

"I'm here because Father wished for me to accompany him," she replied shrewdly. "I cannot help meeting acquaintances while I am here."

"Oh, is that so?" he asked. "I hear you've made a new acquaintance?" Well, if she wanted to play the high-and-mighty game, he could indulge her. "Mayhap you meet her, as well?"

"I suppose it is possible," she agreed. They exchanged a look, before both burst into quiet laughter that was silenced quickly enough by Regulus Black's stern glare. "Ginny's great," she said, much more quietly. "She knows quite a bit more about Quidditch than you do."

"Of course, she grew up in a family obsessed with that infernal sport."

"Father is not too pleased with it."

"What, you socialising with known blood-traitors?"

"Don't say it like that," she pleaded softly. "He's not like that at home. And you understand very well why he finds this inconvenient."

"I do," he admitted. For Slytherins, social standing always came first. "I just think you have the right to make the kinds of friends you wish, rather than the kind you're dictated. You know how snooty some of the other Pure-blood children are."

"There are already plenty of things to use against our family, on both sides of the argument; Uncle Sirius, Aunt Andromeda, Cousin Bellatrix. He doesn't need me making complications for him, as well."

"Not when he has to work with the likes of Lucius Malfoy," Evan agreed. "Still, it is wise to cultivate relationships with both sides, and Ginny is a good ally to have in your corner."

"Oh, so you'll socialise with Draco, then?"

Evan scoffed. "Don't be ridiculous. Aside from the fact that my mother is a 'Mudblood'," he sneered the word with disgust, "he likes to imitate his father and pretend to be better than everyone else. I know you don't mind him since he's family, but Draco is the most conceited, self-absorbed little git I've ever met, and that _actually_ includes Potter. I have no intention of antagonising him, but I won't be joining his circle of followers, either."

"You are an island in a sea of green."

They both giggled quietly at her comment.

"Be careful, Evan," Alya said. "There are a lot of Pure-bloods in your year, and no doubt most of them will be with you in Slytherin."

"That is, if I don't end up in Ravenclaw instead."

She shrugged. "Maybe. Either way, you'll be forced to choose sides eventually."

"I wish people weren't so obsessed with picking sided," he replied with a tired sigh. "Don't worry about me, I'll be perfectly fine."

"I'm sure you will," she replied confidently, eyes straying towards the Platform entrance, where a throng of red hair suddenly appeared. The Weasleys had arrived.

Two identical thirteen-year-olds and their younger sister separated from the group and approached Evan with matching smiles. Fred and George were eying Stheno, who returned their gaze with interest, while Ginny stepped over to give him a peck on the cheek which had him feeling appropriately uncomfortable.

"Is that the famed Kneazle we've heard so much about?" Fred (or maybe George; Evan was pants at differentiating them) asked.

"The one who scratches bullies–"

"–and chases pranksters?"

"One you've kept from us–"

"–for so long?"

"Yes, that is Stheno, and I've not kept her from you; it was just bad scheduling. Stheno, these are Fred and George. Good luck telling them apart."

The kitten cocked her head to the side as she studied the two thirteen-year-olds, before chirping out a greeting, the short, inquisitive one that sounded like the shortest version of her bird call (Evan always ended up giggling whenever he caught her sitting on his windowsill and releasing those half-choked imitations of bird chirps that didn't sound very convincing to his ears, but that seemed very good at confusing even Radagast, an experienced Screech owl who should have known better).

"Say, brother mine, doesn't she sound like..." he said, squinting lightly.

"She does indeed," the other brother replied.

"What?" Ginny asked, looking between them and the Kneazle.

"Looks like a bird to me like that," George (possibly Fred) concluded with a shrug.

"Wonder what Mrs Norris will think," the other brother said thoughtfully, but the glint in his eyes already promised things that couldn't possibly be good.

"Fred! George!" Mrs Weasley's voice rang out over the general noise of the station, and the twins melted back into the crowd like experts, leaving Evan with Ginny and Alya, who didn't seem the least bit shocked by the other girl's two brothers.

"I take it you've met them, then," Evan concluded.

"Yes, at Harry's birthday party last month," Alya confirmed. "Have fun at Hogwarts."

"Yes, that's precisely why I'm going, to have fun," he deadpanned with a roll of his eyes. Alya only gave him a small smile and wandered back to her father, who was now striding towards the barrier, out of which Sirius Black and Harry Potter had just emerged. Following his gaze, Ginny squeaked and grew absolutely red in the face, which Evan took as his queue to board the train.

"If you get bored, you can always write me," he told her. "I'll see you later."

"Don't keep your nose buried in those books for the whole school year," she said, tearing her eyes away from Potter in order to look at him properly. "There are plenty of other things in the world."

"Like Quidditch? No, thank you."

With a smile and a wave, she was off, back towards her family, while Evan approached his parents in the other direction. He had a momentary falter in his step when he realised he wouldn't be seeing either for a while, but Stheno, apparently feeling her human's sadness, rubbed her head against his cheek affectionately. Taking a deep breath, he pushed it out of his mind and focused on the here and now.

"Write to me often, will you?" Lily asked, giving him a tight hug into which he nodded in confirmation. "And make friends."

"Lily, do remember that the reason for his going away is to learn, not to skip curfew with other dunderheads and involve himself in petty squabbles with immature little brats," Severus admonished, and Evan gave him a small smile and a nod.

"Oh, don't rain on his parade, Sev," Lily said, swatting his shoulder lightly. "Especially if you're going to be a hypocrite about it."

His father scoffed at her words, before he, too, pulled Evan into an actual hug.

"I'manna miss you," Evan said into his black turtleneck, breathing in deeply the smell of herbs and fire that lingered even though he wasn't wearing his robes (Evan's mum was more likely to be in Muggle clothing on any given day than Evan's dad, but the sight wasn't nearly rare enough for Evan to find it strange – no, strange was reserved for the way his dad tied his hair back for any sort of Muggle world outings, because it _really_ changed his appearance far more than clothes ever could).

"And I'll miss you, too," his father replied quietly, squeezing his shoulder once before letting him go. "Use that brain of yours I've worked so hard to fill with things other than foolishness."

"Yes, Dad," he said obediently.

"And here; my mother gave it to me when I first started Hogwarts," he said, pulling a metallic object out of his jacket pocket. Frowning, Evan accepted it and turned over in his hand, finding, to his immense pleasure, that it was a potions pocket knife, of the kind he'd seen in the apothecaries and far too expensive for him to get one for himself.

"Dad..." he whispered, extending one of the blades with a flick of his finger to inspect it. It was a little stained, but very sharp to the touch; there were several others in the knife, each for a specific purpose.

"It's old, but in good repair, and your mother renewed all the charms on it."

"Even added a few extra," his mum said, offering him a watery smile, which he returned in kind.

"It is sharp enough to cut through almost anything, so I trust that you'll be extremely careful when handling it."

"Of course," he promised, almost reverently, nearly lunging forward to hug his father tightly again in an uncharacteristic show of emotion. "Thank you, Dad, it's... thank you."

"Be good, my little light," his father whispered, placing a surreptitious kiss on Evan's head. "I'll see you at Christmas."

"Yeah, at Christmas."

"Bye, honey," his mother said with one last hug, before Evan climbed the steps into the train. The eleven-tear-old hurried to the window seat of his chosen compartment, choosing to stare out at the moving mass of students. His parents stood together, tears in his mother's eyes, but obviously comforted by his father's stoic presence; the Weasleys were gathered in a group, six heads with flaming red hair, and one with messy black belonging to Harry Potter; Alya was looking at him from her position by her father, the two Black brothers looking very much alike in everything but posture. Through tears, he watched the Weasleys board the train as the whistle blew loudly, heard its rumble and felt it move, stared out the window until he couldn't see anyone any longer, the last image that of Ginny's teary face as she ran beside the train, waving all the while. Then he wiped his cheeks, told himself not to be a wuss, pulled his _Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_ and a pen out of his trunk, took off his shoes, lifted his feet onto the seat and, letting Stheno settle on his stomach, lowered his head over his book, burying himself and his growing nausea at the thought of leaving home and not seeing his parents for months on end in the reading and marking of pages, not even noticing as the door to his compartment opened and two other boys he didn't especially like seated themselves in the empty seats.

* * *

The first thing Harry saw when he passed the barrier to the Platform 9¾ was a sea of red. Grinning widely, he nearly ran into the crowd of Weasleys, letting Sirius deal with his luggage.

"Oh, is that ickle Harrykins?" one of the twins asked as soon as he pushed his way between the two, just in time to see Mrs Weasley rubbing Ron's nose with her handkerchief.

" _Mum_ – geroff!" he yelled, wriggling free and noticing Harry in the process. "Oi, mate! I was wondering if you'd gotten here already."

"No, just now," he confirmed over one of the twins, who was saying: "Aaah, has ickle Ronniekins got somefink on his nosie?"

"Shut up!" Ron growled.

"Where's Percy?" Mrs Weasley asked, looking around. "And Ginny?"

"Perce's coming now."

"And Ginny's with her little Snake friend."

Harry craned his head around in search of the girl, finding her walking away from Evan Snape. That was one of the things he truly didn't understand – why in the world would a shy, awkward girl like Ginny ever be friends with a slimy, sullen boy like Snape? Half way towards them, Percy joined her, sticking his chest out proudly to show his shiny red and gold badge with the letter _P_ on it.

"Can't stay long, Mother," he said rather self-importantly. "I'm up front, the Prefects have got two compartments to themselves–"

"Oh, are you a _Prefect_ , Percy?" one of the twins asked, looking mightily surprised. "You should have said something, we had no idea!"

"Hang on," the other one cut him off. "I think I remember him saying something about it. Once–"

"Or twice–" Ron added.

"A minute–" the first twin filled in.

"All summer?" Harry joined with a smirk.

"Oh, shut up!" Percy replied, huffing indignantly.

"How come Percy gets new robes, anyway?" the second twin asked.

"Because he's a _Prefect_ ," their mother said fondly. "All right, dear, well, have a good term – send me an owl when you get there."

Percy stuck around only long enough to allow her to kiss his cheek and Ginny to give him a hug, before wandering back towards the front of the train. Once he was out of sight, Mrs Weasley turned to the twins.

"Now, you two, this year, you behave yourselves." Ron and Harry snorted quietly at that, hiding their laughter behind their hands. "If I get one more owl telling me you've... you've blown up a toilet or–"

"Blown up a toilet? We've never blown up a toilet."

"Great idea though, thanks, Mum."

Their grins were positively evil, Harry thought to himself. He couldn't wait to actually start with class and see what kinds of shenanigans they could pull off there.

"It's _not funny_ ," Mrs Weasley admonished sternly. "And look after Ron and Harry."

"Don't worry, ickle Ronniekins and Harrykins are safe with us."

"Shut up," both boys growled in tandem at the twins, who waved merrily as they disappeared into the train. With them gone, Mrs Weasley focused her attention on Harry and Ron, giving them both a warm hug, which Harry accepted happily and Ron tried to squirm out of. Behind her, Harry saw Sirius walking up to them.

"Be good, you two," she said, suddenly sounding somewhat tearful. "Study hard and don't let the twins rope you into anything."

"Sure, Mum," Ron agreed hastily while Harry moved over to hug his guardian.

"Write to me if you need any help coming up with... fun activities," Sirius whispered to him, and Harry grinned in answer.

"You know I will."

"Your parents would be so proud of you, kiddo, if they could see you now."

"Yeah," he agreed, swallowing past the lump in his throat. "But you're here, so that's all right."

The whistle sounded, and with one last hug, the two friends clambered onto the train beside the twins just as it started moving. Ginny was crying, waving wildly as she ran beside the train.

"Don't, Ginny, we'll send you loads of owls," Ron promised.

"We'll send you a Hogwarts toilet seat!" the twin nearest Harry yelled over his brother.

" _George_!"

"Only joking, Mum," Fred answered, staying only long enough to see that his sister didn't fall accidentally in her haste. Then the two thirteen-year-olds wandered away in search of their friend Jordan Lee and his pet tarantula, and Harry and Ron tried to find a compartment of their own. To their great consternation, the only one free was the one occupied by none other than Evan Snape. Harry and Ron exchanged slightly disgusted glances as they studied the boy – he'd taken his shoes off in order to put his feet up, his head was buried in a thick battered book, just as it was the last time Harry had seen him, and he was chewing on a thin black pen. Squeezed between his torso, his legs and his book was a pair of large sea-blue eyes that blinked lazily at him.

Nearly jumping in surprise, it took a moment for Harry to realise it was, in fact, a grey cat with weirdly large ears that was studying them intently. It didn't seem at all interested in Cybèle, whose cage Harry was holding in his hand, but unwilling to take any chances, Harry chose a seat nearest the door and across from Snape, who seemed completely oblivious to the two of them being in the same compartment.

The moment Ron took a seat across from him, however, the cat wiggled out of Snape's lap and approached him, a predatory gleam in its eyes.

"Hey! Keep your cat away from me!" Ron protested, making Snape look up, an expression of surprise on his face, before his green eyes focused on the cat in question.

"Stheno, what have you got?" he asked the cat directly. It hissed in response, blue eyes glued to Ron's chest. Ron covered it with his hand quickly, shooting a dirty look Snape's way.

"I have a pet rat," he informed the boy. "So you better get that thing away from me."

"Merlin," the dark-haired boy said with a roll of his eyes, before calling the cat back, which turned its head to look at him. "You'll get plenty of chances when we get there, Stheno, don't make a scene now."

"Hey!"

"I'm sorry, did you want something?" Snape asked Ron, looking completely innocent, as if he hadn't just encouraged his familiar to hunt down Ron's.

"Your cat better not be anywhere near Scabbers, you hear me, Snape?"

"You should have thought of that, Weasley, when you got a rat in the first place, seeing how a third of the school populace has cats as familiars," Snape replied condescendingly, petting his lap. The cat sent one more nasty glare Ron's way, before turning in its spot and marching back into the boy's lap, tufty tail held high in the air. It settled down, but its eyes stayed glued to Ron's jacket all the while. "Do at least try to find a more likely suspect within your own dorm if the thing goes missing, however, before accusing my familiar of doing it." Then Snape promptly put his nose back down into the book, a curtain of hair falling down to separate them from him. It was just as well, Harry decided.

The trolley arrived some time past noon, and Harry got them enough sweets to last for a good week. They went through them slowly, completely ignoring the sandwiches they'd been given for the trip. Harry gave Cybèle a few owl treats, and around the time they were finishing, Snape dug through his backpack and got his own sandwich out, as well as a cat plate into which he poured some cat food. His cat ate it willingly enough, but its eyes didn't stray much from Ron, who looked more than a little discomforted by it. They traded the Chocolate Frog cards between them, and tried to guess the flavours of Berty Bott's Beans before eating them, laughing all the while when the other one ran into a particularly foul candy.

Neville poked his head in at one point, looking very tearful.

"Sorry, but have you seen a toad at all? I've lost him! He keeps getting away from me!"

"He'll turn up," Harry said, knowing of that stupid toad perfectly well from Neville's stories during his birthday.

"Yes," the boy agreed miserably. "Well, if you see him..."

To their surprise, Snape's cat jumped out of his lap at that. It eyed Neville for a moment, studied Ron, then looked back at Neville, who had a stupidly confused expression on his face. Releasing a soft meow, the cat tiptoed out of the compartment, strutting as if it owned the place, and disappeared down the hallway.

"Oi, your cat's gone off to eat Neville's toad!" Ron exclaimed, wide-eyed.

"Oh, don't be stupid, Weasley," Snape replied with an exasperated sigh. "She has no need to eat _toads_ , your rat is probably more than tasty enough." He gave Ron a disdainful look. "Then again, maybe not. Go on, Longbottom," he said, turning to Neville, who was still staring at them. "She seems to want to find him for you."

"Oh..." Neville replied and disappeared from the door. When Harry looked, Snape was back in his book, making an annotation in what looked like a ledger. Bemused, Harry shook his head, to which Ron responded by twirling his finger around his temple in the universal sign for 'mental'. With a grin, Harry nodded, watching as Ron pulled the sleeping grey rat out of his inner jacket pocket and placed it on his legs, secure now that the cat was out of the compartment.

"If I'd brought a toad, I'd lose it as quickly as I could."

Snape snorted. "You're the one to talk. You brought a _rat_."

"Stick that big nose of yours back into your book and out of my business, Snape," Ron shot back. With a roll of his eyes, Snape actually did as Ron had asked him to. "Did you hear about Gringotts?"

"About the vault?" Harry guessed, nodding eagerly. "Yeah, I did. And I even know why they didn't manage to steal anything!"

"Well?" Ron asked eagerly.

"Because Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper, took whatever it was in the vault out. Sirius and I ran into him when we were shopping for school supplies, and he rode with us down to the vaults."

"But how do you know that was the right vault?"

"I heard Sirius and Remus talking about it and he mentioned the vault number. It was the same one that Hagrid emptied."

"Well, what was in it?"

"Dunno, some small brown package."

"What, that's all?" Ron asked dubiously, and Harry nodded in confirmation just as the compartment door slid open and Draco Malfoy came into view, flanked by a pair of ugly, stupid-looking logs of boys that appeared to be his bodyguards, if such a thing were a profession for eleven-year-olds.

"Harry Potter," he greeted coolly.

"Draco Malfoy," Harry replied in the same manner. Across from him, Ron sniggered, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Snape shift in his seat, but remain with his head in the book.

"Think my name's funny, do you? No need to ask who _you_ are. My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford."

"Yes, and my godfather told me all the Malfoys bleach their hair, look like they don't even know what sun is, and can barely get the one child they do have," Harry shot right back, noticing how red Ron had gone.

"I'd be careful if I were you, Potter," Malfoy replied, but his cheeks had gotten a red tinge. "Unless you're a bit politer, you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't know what was good for them, either."

Both Harry and Ron jumped to their feet, but Malfoy's eyes zeroed in on the third passenger.

"Snape," he said, pretending not to see the other two, which only made them angrier, because being dismissed after being provoked was _beyond_ insulting. Snape lifted his head and surveyed the room.

"Malfoy," he answered in a neutral tone. "What brings you to this future-Gryffindor-infested place?"

"Just wished to extend my invite to our compartment. There is a seat left."

"Malfoy, get lost," Harry growled, losing any patience he might have had.

"I wasn't talking to you, Potter, if you're too stupid to notice."

"Well, now you are, so do yourself a favour and _get lost_."

"You want to fight me, do you, Potter?" Malfoy sneered. "Unfortunately, we don't feel like leaving, do we, boys? We have some unfinished business here with people who are actually worth something."

One of the two logs leaned forward, and Ron pulled out his battered wand, but before anything else could happen, the big block of a boy screamed and started shaking his finger wildly, Scabbers hanging off of it, his sharp little teeth sunken in deeply, while at the same time Snape's cat hissed from the hallway and Neville gave a surprised yelp. Finally, Scabbers flew off the other boy, hitting the window, and Malfoy disappeared out of the doorway with his two cronies just as a bushy-haired girl appeared in his place.

"What _has_ been going on?" she asked, looking at the compartment floor, where Ron now kneeled to pull Scabbers up by his tail. Harry's eyes immediately swivelled to the grey cat, surprised to find that, if it had been a human, Harry would have called its gaze calculating. As it was, the cat strutted back into the compartment to curl in Snape's lap.

"Er, thanks," Neville said awkwardly. "Your cat found Trevor."

"You're welcome," Snape replied calmly, just as Ron shook his head in bemusement, peering at his rat.

"I don't believe it. He's gone back to sleep."

"You haven't been fighting, have you?" the girl asked reproachfully. "You'll be in trouble before we even get there!"

"Scabbers has been fighting, not us," Ron replied, scowling. "Who are you, anyway?"

"Hermione Granger," she replied, looking at Ron's right hand. "Were you using magic? I've tried a few simple spells just for practice and it's all worked for me. Nobody in my family's magic at all, it was ever such a surprise when I got my letter, but I was ever so pleased, of course, I mean, it's the very best school of witchcraft there is, I've heard – I've learnt all our set books off by heart, of course, I just hope it will be enough. But the rules are clear, you are not allowed to hex other students, not even on the Hogwarts Express. _Hogwarts, a History_ clearly says so."

Harry and Ron eyed each other, both thinking that the girl was too bossy for their taste.

"Anyway, who are you?"

"Neville Longbottom," Neville said, appearing pretty intimidated by the bossy girl himself.

"I'm Ron Weasley," Ron muttered, glaring at her. "And that's Harry Potter."

"Are you really?" she asked, peering at his forehead. "I know all about you, of course – I got a few extra books for background reading, and you're in _Modern Magical History_ and _The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts_ and _Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century_."

Snape snorted again. "I'm sure he can even get you to recite all the passages for him, too."

"Shut it, Snape," Harry hissed.

"So, do any of you know what house you'll be in?" the girl asked in interest, stepping over the candy to seat herself beside Harry. Neville, after scanning the corridor, walked in as well, choosing to sit between Ron and Snape. Suddenly, their compartment seemed to be overcrowded.

"I bet he'll be in Slytherin," Ron said, pointing to Snape. "He's sure slimy enough."

"Lions salivate far more than snakes do, though I'm not surprised you don't know the first thing about it," Snape replied dryly, head in his book, but from the angle of his seat, Harry could see red blossoming on the other boy's cheeks.

"So, you _do_ want to be a Slytherin?" the girl asked, sounding disdainful and confused. Snape shot her a scathing look over his book, the green eyes looking quite terrifying behind that curtain of black hair.

"My whole family's been Gryffindor for generations. I'd leave if I got sorted into Slytherin," Ron said, shaking his head and turning to Harry. "Wouldn't you?"

Harry only shrugged, remembering that Regulus and his wife were pretty decent for Slytherins, not to mention Andromeda, and that Sirius' family was also Slytherin for generations, yet he'd ended up in Gryffindor with Harry's dad.

"So, where do _you_ want to go, Harry?"

Harry grinned at her, straightening in his seat and lifting his hand into the air to thrust his imaginary Sword of Gryffindor high above his head. " _'_ _Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart_ _'_. Like my dad."

For the third time that day, Snape snorted.

"Got a problem with that, Snape?" Harry asked, quite irritated by now with the boy.

"No. If you'd rather be brawny than brainy, I applaud it. It suits you better, in any case."

"As I won't be going to the same house as you, I see that as a good thing. If brainy encompasses the likes of you, oh Lord of Grease, I'm keeping my distance from it."

He had the pleasure of seeing Snape go completely red in the face as Ron snorted out a laugh, but before the other boy could reply, his cat hissed menacingly, and Hermione jumped in, possibly sensing another brawl in the making.

"I've been asking around and Gryffindor sounds by far the best, I hear Dumbledore himself was one, but I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad..." she tapered off, as if suddenly realising that she was speaking about it to a Slytherin-wannabe.

Ron leaned over. "Whatever house I'm in," he whispered, "I hope she's not in it."

"What about you, Neville?" Hermione asked loudly, to which Neville timidly shrug his shoulders.

"I think I'll be Hufflepuff," he replied.

"There's nothing wrong with Hufflepuff," she tried to assure him, though she didn't sound very assured herself. "You should all change, you know, we'll be there soon, I asked the driver just now and he said we're nearly there."

"Well, would you mind leaving while we change?" Ron asked irritably.

"Fine!" she huffed. "I only came in here because people outside are behaving very childishly, racing up and down the corridors, letting their pets out of their cages." She raised her head high and moved to step out, sending Ron a scathing look. "You've got dirt on your nose, by the way, did you know?"

"Oh, would you just leave already!" he exclaimed, his nerves obviously as worn out as Harry's after Malfoy's insults, Snape's scathing remarks, the cat's glares and Granger's know-it-all attitude. "No one invited you in the first place! Bossy know-it-all," he grumbled as she stomped down the hallway. "If she ends up in the same house as I do, it'll be seven years of hell!"

"My trunk's in the other compartment," Neville said quietly as he stood up.

"We'll see you at Hogwarts, then, Neville," Harry waved him goodbye, shutting the door behind him. When he turned around, Snape was seating himself back down, school robes already on him. Blinking, Harry tried to remember when the other boy had had time to pull them on, before deciding it really wasn't all that important in the first place. By the time Ron and he had shrugged their jackets off and pulled their robes on, Snape had tied his shoelaces and was now occupying himself with placing his cat into a relatively roomy carrier.

" _We will be reaching Hogwarts in five minutes_ _'_ _time_ ," a voice echoed through the train. " _Please leave your luggage on the train, it will be taken to the school separately._ "

Now dressed and ready, Harry and Ron joined the crowd in the corridor as the train finally stopped. Then everyone rushed their way towards the door and out onto a tiny, dark platform.

"Firs'-years! Firs'-years over here!" Hagrid's familiar voice bellowed from the direction of a lamp that had started bobbing over the heads of the students. "C'mon, follow me – any more firs'-years? Mind yer step, now! Firs'-years, follow me!"

Hagrid led them down a steep, narrow path that gradually emerged under his lamp's light from the absolute darkness beyond.

"Yeh'll get yer firs' sight o' Hogwarts in a sec, jus' round this bend here."

And the narrow path opened suddenly to the shore of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers – Hogwarts. A collective gasp broke the silence as everyone took in the sight.

"No more'n four to a boat!"

Harry and Ron ended up in a boat with Neville and Hermione, who was decidedly not paying attention to them, obviously still insulted by Ron's words. Ron, in turn, grumbled under his breath about having to share the boat with her and how he hoped it wasn't foreshadowing of their house placement (Harry called it foreshadowing, what with Ron not knowing the specific term).

"Everyone in?" Hagrid bellowed from his own boat. "Right then – _forward_!"

The ride across was mostly silent, as everyone stared up at the magnificent sight towards which they were slowly sailing. Hagrid told them to put down their heads when they were about to pass into the cliff through a curtain of ivy, and they remained in collective stunned awe while they sailed through the dark tunnel, finally reaching a kind of underground harbour some five minutes later. The group of roughly forty eleven-year-olds clambered out, following Hagrid's massive form up a passageway carved in the rock that led them onto damp grass-covered courtyard right in the shadow of the castle. One flight of stone steps later, they were all crowding in front of the huge oak front door.

"Everyone here? Good."

He then raised a gigantic fist and knocked three times on the castle door, the sound reverberating all around them ominously. The door swung open at once, letting them see a stern, dark-haired witch in emerald-green robes standing just beyond it. From Sirius' stories, Harry guessed who she was.

"The firs'-years, Perfessor McGonagall," Hagrid said, confirming Harry's silent suspicion that she was, indeed, Minerva McGonagall, the Transfigurations Professor and Head of Gryffindor House.

"Thank you, Hagrid," she replied. "I will take them from here."

She led them through the enormous Entrance Hall towards the buzz of hundreds of voices talking over each other to the right of the entrance. Contrary to Harry's thoughts, she led them to a small empty chamber off to the side of the hall and gave them a thorough lecture on how the school worked – they would first be sorted during the start-of-term banquet, after which they'd spend most of their days with the people sorted with them. They'd earn or lose house points based on their behaviour in order to earn the House Cup.

Of course, Sirius had already told Harry all of this. What he'd refused to tell was how they sorted into houses, but Fred's ridiculous story that it hurt a lot had been dismissed the moment Ron had mentioned it. Off a bit to his right, Hermione Granger was whispering very fast about all the spells she'd learnt and wondering which one she'd need. At that moment, he fully agreed with Ron – if they got sorted into the same house, it would be hellish seven years.

"Does she never _stop_?" Ron moaned beside him, and Harry could do nothing but shrug helplessly.

"It won't be a test of knowledge," he heard Snape telling Hermione, grateful to the other boy (oh, the horror) when she finally shut up. "They sort by inner qualities, not spells you aren't even supposed to know yet."

"Oh. How do they do it, then?"

He didn't hear Snape's response, because the room suddenly became flooded with ghosts, pearly-white and transparent, and obviously arguing about 'Peeves'. Harry and Ron grinned to each other – they'd heard plenty of stories about the resident poltergeist, both from the two Marauders and from the Weasley twins. But, before anyone could do much more than gape, Professor McGonagall was back, shooing the ghosts and forming the first-years into a line.

The Great Hall was amazing, in Harry's opinion, lit by thousands and thousands of candles floating in mid-air over four long tables filled with the rest of the student body. Four enormous banners hung above each of the tables, depicting the four animals of the Hogwarts crest, background colours corresponding to the official House colours. At the top of the hall was another long table, occupied by teachers (Harry gave a small wave to Dumbledore, who answered with a knowing smile), and that was where McGonagall led them to. Looking up, Harry allowed himself to stare with awe at the velvety black ceiling dotted with stars.

By the time he looked back down, Professor McGonagall had already placed a four-legged stool in front of them, and a pointed wizard's hat on it, patched and frayed and extremely dirty, that opened its mouth (a rip near the brim) and started singing. If the song wasn't that impressive, the sheer fact that a _hat_ was _singing_ was enough. It gave out the qualities of each house – _Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart; Hufflepuff, where they are just and loyal; Ravenclaw, if you_ _'_ _re a ready mind; Slytherin, those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends_ – proclaiming loudly at the very end that it was a 'Thinking Cap', no doubt trying to be funny.

It bowed to the four tables when its song was awarded with applause, and Harry joined in, grinning madly. He was looking forward to this. Now that he actually stood in front of it, gone was the doubt that he'd end up anywhere but in his parents' old house; he just knew it. In its place was the sort of excitement that made him want to jump on his toes and run in circles, but he forced himself to stand calmly. After all, he was Harry Potter; he couldn't look like a snivelling brat when everyone was watching.

"When I call your name, you will put on the hat and sit on the stool to be sorted," McGonagall said after she stepped forwards and unrolled a long piece of parchment. "Abbott, Hannah!"

And so it began. Harry tried to memorise as many names of his classmates as he could, remembering Sirius' advice on how important it was to always be aware of your surroundings – and that included, most of all, people. He was sure he'd forget half by tomorrow, but any chance to practice a skill the Aurors needed was not to be missed, in his opinion.

The girl whose name McGonagall had just called out was sorted, along with the one following her, Susan Bones, in Hufflepuff. Terry Boot went to Ravenclaw with Mandy Brocklehurst, while Lavender Brown became the first new Gryffindor. So far, that table, to the far left, was the loudest. Millicent Bulstrode went to Slytherin, as well as a mousy-looking girl by the name of Tracey Davis and the two logs that were Malfoy's cronies, Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, while Justin Finch-Fletchley was another Hufflepuff. Michael Corner, Kevin Entwhistle, and Stephen Cornfoot went to Ravenclaw, and Seamus Finnigan, a sandy-haired boy that had stood in front of Harry in the line, was sorted into Gryffindor, before Hermione Granger's name was called out.

The girl almost ran to the stool and jammed the hat eagerly on her head. Her enthusiasm got lost somewhere in the long three minutes – the longest so far – during which the hat wiggled around a bit, but remained silent. Finally, just when Harry was becoming impatient, it called out 'Ravenclaw'. He heard Ron beside him give out a small sigh of relief as they both watched the girl walk to the middle right table and join the other two first-years already sorted. Neville's sorting, surprisingly, took equally long. He fell over on his way to the stool, and looked almost as if quivering the whole time. His expression was equal parts grim and dazed when the hat pronounced him a Gryffindor, and in his nervousness, he ran off actually wearing the hat, for which he was awarded with gales of laughter.

Megan Jones and Wayne Hopkins before him had gone to Hufflepuff, Anthony Goldstein and Sue Li into Ravenclaw, and Daphne Greengrass was a Slytherin. Morag MacDougal after him was another Ravenclaw, and the hat barely touched Malfoy's head before it yelled out 'Slytherin' (not that Harry had expected anything differentl). Ernest Macmillan and Roger Malone ended up in Hufflepuff, while Lily Moon was yet another Slytherin with Theodore Nott and Pansy Parkinson, the latter, pug-faced girl looking extremely pleased with herself. The surprise of the evening, for Harry, were the Patil twins – Parvati was sorted into Gryffindor, while Padma went to Ravenclaw. Sally-Anne Perks was the last person to be sorted before Harry, and she went to Gryffindor with Parvati and Lavender. Then Harry's name was called, and whispers broke out as he proudly strode forwards.

" _Potter_ , did she say?"

" _The_ Harry Potter?"

The black rim of the hat obscured his view before he could see much else but a crowd of students.

"Hmm," a small voice in his head commented thoughtfully. "Interesting. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind, either. There's talent, oh my goodness, yes, and quite a bit of loyalty, too. And ambition, interesting. So where shall I put you?"

 _I can choose?_ Harry thought with surprise. _Didn_ _'_ _t think that was an option._

"Ah, so you do have a preference?"

 _Gryffindor_ , Harry replied instantly. _Like my Dad. Like Sirius._

"Yes, you do remind me of them quite a bit. And you certainly have your father's heart. Well, then, _Gryffindor_!"

Smiling smugly, Harry took the hat off and walked towards the Gryffindor table, which was almost deafening in their cheers and whistles. Percy shook his hand vigorously, and the twins kept yelling 'We've got Potter! We've got Potter!'. He seated himself beside Seamus Finnigan and turned to follow the rest of the sorting, eager not to miss a single name.

* * *

Watching Potter strut towards the Gryffindor table so full of himself made Evan understand completely what his father always talked about when he described his childhood nemesis. Honestly, as if there had ever been any chance he'd be anywhere else _but_ in Gryffindor... or that he belonged anywhere else, he added mentally. Shaking his head, Evan focused back on the Professor McGonagall, who was now calling out Rivers, Oliver. He, along with Sophie Roper and Leanne Runcorn after him, became a Hufflepuff while Sally Smith went to Gryffindor. Than it was Evan's name being called, and he walked towards the chair.

In spite of already knowing the hat had to be looking into people's heads when it chose the houses, Evan was still surprised by the gentle Legilimency probe he felt when it was put onto his head.

 _Curious,_ the hat spoke into his mind. _Such interest in knowledge. Ah, but what a sharp mind you have, when you_ _'_ _ve managed to figure out my secret. Not many do, these days. And there_ _'_ _s chivalry there, too, with a strong sense of justice._

 _You haven_ _'_ _t named the most important thing yet_ , Evan thought wryly.

 _Of course, of course, the thirst to prove yourself. And quite a bit of cunning, as well, though that comes with most sharp minds. So what would you wish, then?_

 _Slytherin_ , he replied. _Just like Dad._

 _Yes, you do seem too goal-oriented for Ravenclaw, and you lack a certain creative flare that marks all of the best of them. Very well_ , "Slytherin!"

Evan handed the hat back to Professor McGonagall and walked over to the far right table to loud claps and cheers, where he seated himself between Tracey Davis and Theodore Nott. Malfoy was looking at him with a satisfied gleam in his eyes, and the older students were measuring him up. He cast a glance at the High Table, only long enough to meet Professor Dumbledore's knowing gaze, before focusing back on the rest of the Sorting. It would be useful to know who was who and where they belonged as early as possible.

Ronald Weasley, predictably, was sorted into Gryffindor, together with Dean Thomas. Eying them across the hall, Evan could feel dread settling in his stomach as the two boys joined Potter and Finnigan. His mind raced back to all the stories he'd heard from his father about the 'Marauders', and watching the four Gryffindors now whispering among each other, he had a nasty suspicion history would be repeating itself.

Finally, Lisa Turpin was sorted into Ravenclaw, and Blaise Zabini, as they'd thought, was placed in Slytherin, after which Professor McGonagall rolled up the parchment and took the Sorting Hat away brusquely.

Dumbledore's address was somewhat wackier than the man usually behaved, but then that was the whole point, wasn't it. "Welcome! Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you!"

"That old fool is just barmy," Malfoy commented from across Evan as Dumbledore seated himself back into his seat, just as the food appeared on their table.

"That doesn't make him any less powerful," Theodore Nott pointed out calmly. Malfoy gave him a look, but didn't disagree.

Before anything else could be said, the translucent form of a ghost seated itself beside Malfoy, who instantly tensed. Evan studied the ghost, identifying him in his head as the Bloody Baron – really, there could have been no mistake, what with silvery blood trailing out of his chest wounds and all.

"You're the Bloody Baron," Tracey Davis said excitedly.

"If you have the need to point out the obvious, you should have been in Gryffindor," Malfoy commented with a sneer, all the while trying to slip slightly away from the menacing ghost.

"Seeing how you're the one who started it, I feel justified," she shot back, matching his sneer with her own, before turning back to the ghost. "It's nice to meet you," she continued politely, inclining her head in a little bow.

"So you are this year's Slytherin's brood," the Bloody Baron answered, casting a look about the little group that was at the same time dubious and assessing, and definitely far more favourable when it landed on Davis than the one he gave Malfoy, who still, despite his best efforts, appeared very uncomfortable with the ghostly presence seated beside him. In that sense, the Bloody Baron reminded Evan of his own father, imposing and menacing without saying anything concrete at all. In any case, he seemed very effective at silencing the chatter around him.

Crabbe and Goyle broke the stilted silence by reaching for food – no doubt the primary thing on their minds if their girth was any indication. Just like Evan's disgusting cousin Dudley, with eyes as big as their butts and as keen as their jaws. Of course, once they started piling food on their plates, everyone else reached for their own, because it became very obvious very quickly that, should they wait longer, there wouldn't be any food left to eat. Still, it brought some liveliness back into the group of first-years, and they gradually returned to conversation.

"Do you enjoy the company of the _resident celebrity_ , Snape?" Malfoy asked, casting a disgusted look at the Gryffindor table, where the four first-year boys were whispering among themselves.

For his part, Evan snorted. "As much as any self-respecting Slytherin ever could," he replied with a slightly exaggerated roll of his eyes. "Too bad I have little use for late invitations, Malfoy. I have to say, though, that the spectacle Weasel's rat provided has made me reconsider allowing my cat free hunting in that particular part of the castle."

"What happened?" Daphne Greengrass asked before Malfoy could retort. It was best in any case – Evan thought it better to be on good terms with the little blond snot, but they both knew the boy had not come to that compartment to extend an invitation to Evan, only to provoke Potter. Evan had no intention of sucking up Malfoy's butt like the two oafs or the shrilly Parkinson seemed happy to do, but he would be damned if he let himself be cowed by the boy either. He had his own pride, and he would not let someone with more money than him stomp all over it.

The rest of dinner passed in conversation filled with needling comments designed to test each person there. The higher years didn't pay them too much attention, too occupied with discussing their summer, but the Bloody Baron stayed all the while, listening and watching their little interplays, while generally making Malfoy a little more on edge than was usual for the boy.

When the food disappeared, Dumbledore got to his feet again, and the Great Hall fell silent instantly. His words were said lightly, and his eyes twinkled as they usually did, but there was no mistaking the seriousness of his announcements, especially the one about the third-flood corridor on the right-hand side and dying a very painful death should it be disregarded. True, Hogwarts had its fair share of dangerous sections and inhabitants to be avoided, but saying this outright just made it sound like an open invitation, especially if that look the Headmaster gave a certain pair of twins across the Hall was anything to go by. Aside from that, he informed the room that the Charms classroom had been moved up a floor, as noted on their updated school maps (which obviously didn't mean much to the first-years, who didn't know where the old one had been located in the first place).

Singing the school song was one of the experiences Evan knew he could have lived without, with everyone singing to their own tune and making it a general cacophony that was just painful for the ears. Still, it was worth it to hear the twins proudly tapering off at the very end to a slow funeral march. They were probably the only ones who could make something so sombre seem so entertaining.

The Prefect who led the first-years down the stairs into the very bowels of the school introduced herself as Gemma Farley, a fifth-year, and she explained to them that the Slytherin quarters were in the dungeons, under the lake, which meant that they were strictly forbidden from provoking the inhabitants that would be swimming by their windows. She gave them the password, _Micrurus diastema_ , which was terribly clichéd in Evan's point of view (though most of the kids found it very impressive when Gemma explained that it was the Latin name for a type of coral snake), only when they got to the entrance, a very non-descript stone wall that could easily have been dismissed as a possible entrance.

The common room beyond it was magnificent, lit by soft green lights that gave a sense of mystique. Again, pretty clichéd, but Evan wasn't complaining in the least. He was sure the room would look spectacular in the morning, when the dark windows were lit by the light filtered through the murky green waters of the lake. There was little warmth in the décor, true, but then Evan was never one for cuddly things in the first place. His own room at home was perhaps a converted attic, small and with a slanted roof, but the cold tones made it feel spacious, open, and uncluttered. This room quite clearly conveyed the element of the House itself – water.

It already felt like home.

"The password to the quarters will be posted on the board fortnightly," Gemma Fairley said, commanding their attention. "The boys quarters are down the left corridor, and the girls down the right. Be forewarned that boys will not be able to enter that corridor, and should they try to, they will suffer extremely embarrassing consequences." The first-years snickered at that, earning a glowering look from the fifth-year. "You have an hour to unpack and settle before you are required to present yourself here, in the common room. At this time, our Head of House, Professor Horace Slughorn, will further educate you as to the meaning of your sorting into this proud and noble house." She was somewhat uncomfortably stiff and posh in her delivery, but if anyone noticed, they didn't say anything. "One rule that you will _always_ obey is that outside of these walls, we present a unified front. We receive enough dislike from the other houses as is, you will not add anything as evidence to their perceptions. While you are at Hogwarts, this is your home, and the students sharing it with you are your family, is that clear?" Heads bobbed in acquiescence from the eleven first-years, and a satisfied smile spread over the older girl's face. "Well, then, you are dismissed."

And with that, she led the five girls into their corridor, leaving the six boys to find their own way around, something that suited each and every one of them. After all, wasn't the whole point of new things to explore them for yourself?

As they headed for their hallway, Evan found his queasiness about leaving home and not seeing his parents pushed to the side, seeming completely insignificant compared to all the splendour and excitement that was the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And besides, he had Stheno with him, his Kneazle lounging on his bed, waiting for him, and he'd get to see his parents soon enough. Far more importantly than that – he was finally going to get to learn _magic_.

That seemed far more important by comparison, at least for the evening.


	5. Ch 4: The First Day of a New Life

**Chapter 4: The First Day of a New Life**

The first day of school, Monday the 2nd of September, for the forty-one first-year students, wide-eyed and still very much under the first impressions of the magical school, began when they were directed by the seventh-year prefects to the largest classroom on the first floor, in the south part of the castle, past the horde of older students rushing up and down the corridors, most of them with their heads in notebooks and other notes of their own creation.

"Whaddaya think's going on?" Dean Thomas asked Harry once the four Gryffindor boys had reached the classroom. The four boys had had a grand time last night at the feast, after the sorting, and had affirmed their fast friendships during breakfast today.

"They've got tests this week, Fred and George always complain about it," Ron revealed, to the horror of the other three. "Percy's always on about getting into those advanced classes; that's how you get into them, if you do good on the First Week Tests."

"What? That's insane!" Seamus exclaimed. "Who ever remembers anything after the summer hols?!"

"That's exactly why they've instituted the tests," Hermione Granger, the Ravenclaw know-it-all butted in, already holding a mountain of books in her hands, her insanely wild hair flying about her cheeks. "They only test what we've already learned in the previous years, and so they can separate those who review over the summer to make sure they don't forget everything, and those who'd rather play for two months. These people can't follow the advanced curriculum, can they, when they've forgotten everything."

"And who's asked you?" Ron retorted, making a face at her. The girl harrumphed and turned on her heel, moving to join the other Ravenclaws, who were gathering on the other side of the room. "Really; she's as annoying as my sister Ginny!"

Ten minutes later, the last of the students had joined the group – a breathless Hufflepuff girl – and everyone had found themselves a desk to sit at. And just in time, too; not two minutes after, two professors walked in.

They were identical twins, that was clearly obvious to Harry; short and sort of tiny, they looked like they could be seventh-years. Their hairs were a non-descript sort of light brown and their cheeks were heavily freckled beneath light blue eyes that seemed to dance; Harry decided he liked them.

"Hello, firsties," the one on the left said; dressed in black jeans, high-heeled boots, and a dark green shirt, with sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a grey neck cloth tied under the collar, she looked the antithesis of every single other person in Hogwarts, which was saying quite a lot, considering there was some seven hundred souls currently residing in it. "My name is Enya MacCraken..."

"And I'm Aoife Mac Reachtain," the one on the right said; unlike her sister, she wore modest copper-hemmed, light-blue robes that matched the colour of her eyes, and a typical wizarding hat of the kind all first-years had put on today – and plenty of them had regretted once they'd seen that older students more often than not went without.

They also both had what Harry decided were Irish accents, quite similar to Seamus, though there was a discord that made him think they were from different parts of Ireland. It was pronounced enough that he had to strain a bit to understand them, though having been listening to Seamus since last night, it wasn't as difficult as he'd found it in the past when he'd run into an Irishman before.

"We will be your professors for the next seven years of your schooling," Enya MacCraken explained. "Like most other professors here, we teach two subjects each, one required and one elective."

"We'll leave electives for another time, since you lot have more than enough time for that later on," Aoife Mac Reachtain tied in. "Now, you've surely noticed that most of the older students are very busy cramming this morning for their tests; we're here to tell you that you're, unfortunately, not exempt from these."

A collective gasp rang out through the room; Harry's heart began beating wildly, and he grinned at the challenge. Whatever they threw at him, he was certain he could skate through on what spells Sirius had already taught him during the last month. There was no way they expected more from first-years.

"Now, this little test you'll be having is not on any magical ability you might have, or any knowledge you've managed–"

"–Or not managed, in the case of our numerous Muggle-borns and Muggle-raiseds–"

" –To pick up in your eleven years of existence," Enya finished (Harry had decided that they were just too young to be called Professor MacCraken and Professor Mac Reachtain, and that Enya and Aoife were much more practical – really, some last names were just ridiculous – not to mention that they fit better in his head). "What we'll be testing is your knowledge of the two worlds that we all must exist in."

"In other words, the test you will be doing will ask you everything from what a computer is–"

"–To the proper way of addressing a goblin. There are, of course, wrong answers."

"There are, however, no grades," Aoife finished. "Your results will help us divide you into two classes; some of you will therefore have to take Wizarding Culture class with me..."

"And some of you will be assigned to my Muggle Culture class," Enya explained, and now it became apparent why she was dressed as a Muggle. "The lucky, lucky few of you, who have enough knowledge that either class would be too boring for you for this year, will have a free period."

"Lucky, lucky you," the other twin agreed. "Just for this year, mind you; next year is a whole other matter."

"Now, our young Padawans," (and here a few of the students sniggered madly, while most others blinked in confusion) "you'll get your tests, and try to answer as best you can. After you're done, we'll take the time to look them over while some of the other professors stop by to give you important information for the beginning of the school year."

"You do not want to be running around like headless chickens, do you?" Enya asked, peering at them critically and cocking her head to the side. "Well, perhaps some of you do; I've found that the best way of discovering interesting nooks and crannies of this place."

"While generally being late to most of your classes," her sister reminded her. She pulled out her wand and flicked it at a stack of papers and writing utensils. "Raise your hands, all who prefer to write with quills." A little more than half the class raised their hands.

With a wicked little smirk, Aoife sent pens their ways, while distributing the quills to the other half, who seemed about as dismayed as the first at the switch.

"Let this be your first lesson, kiddies," Enya said, "that there are plenty of things that are at first glance completely different, but fulfil the same functions in both of our worlds. Sneering at one or the other will not be tolerated in our classes, nor in the big wide world, once you actually do go into it."

"I'm not writing with _this_ ," Malfoy exclaimed, making faces at the pen he'd received. In response, Enya lifted her eyebrow.

"You are not writing with anything else, Mr Malfoy; these," and here Aoife sent the papers and parchments through the room to match with the writing utensils, "are charmed to not absorb any ink but the one in that pen. Now, either you want to fail the test and be the first student since the institution of these classes who had to take _both_ classes, or you'll humble your noble self and write like five billion other people do, with quite a bit of success, mind."

"When my father hears about this–"

"And there go the first five points off Slytherin House," Enya cut him off, making the boy pale instantly as the other Slytherins turned to glare at him. "Shame; I hate taking points off my old house, and on the first day, too."

" _You_ were in Slytherin?!" Pansy Parkinson squeaked in a shrill tone that Harry knew would be giving him headaches, were he forced to spend much time with her.

"And why shouldn't I have been, Miss Parkinson? Because I'm Muggle-born? Pure-bloods do not hold monopoly on ambition, cunning and resourcefulness, no more than any other group of people."

"Take note, children," Aoife said, "that we might look friendly, but that appearances tend to give false impressions and deceive. Mr Malfoy, invoking your father in our classes with the intention of intimidation will not be tolerated. No matter our age, we are your professors, and you are our students, and this is how you will behave."

"Now, if there are no more questions..."

The almost-late Hufflepuff girl raised her hand, looking more than a little nervous.

"Yes, Miss Roper?" Aoife asked.

"I'm sorry, Professor, but I don't know how to write with a quill."

Some students made rude noises, but those were few and far between – the Pure-bloods and Wizard-raiseds were now finding that writing with pens was not nearly as easy as it looked; Harry knew from experience that the thickness of the pen made gripping it awkward for those who were used to the slenderness of the quills, and that writing from the side with barely any pressure as one would with a quill usually resulted in a broken, barely visible line. He'd learned both ways of writing and thus felt no compunction about being assigned a quill, even when he'd not raised his hand for it.

"That is quite all right, Miss Roper; one of the things we want to know is how well you can use the utensils given to you. All those who need assistance will be given remedial tutoring by older students in your houses."

"Now, if there's nothing else, you're free to start, and you have one hour's time."

With a cacophony of papers turning, pens clicking, quills squealing and chairs moving, the students found their comfortable positions and began the test.

Harry found that he knew most of the questions pertaining to the wizarding world. They were mixed up, one question asking about the typical wizarding familiars and the next asking about a telephone. What he didn't know, he guessed, mostly based on what he did know of the Muggle world and what he assumed would be the equivalents in the magical world, like an escalator and the riding cart of Gringotts Bank.

Ron seemed completely stumped on how to hold the pen, grasping it impractically under an acute angle to the paper, until Harry managed to hiss at him to look at Seamus and imitate him. On his other side, Dean seemed mostly confused by the quill, shaking it out every other minute, as if it didn't want to write for him (which it probably didn't, since he was trying to write under a right angle as he would with a pen). Harry kicked his chair lightly and pointed with his eyes to his own quill to demonstrate. At least, he thought to himself, it was good that they'd given out self-filling quills, because he could just imagine the messiness of the parchments if students were forced to dip the quills in ink every other question.

All around him, students were quietly helping one another in this manner. The first attempt at talking was punished with a house point lost, so those who did think to ask around for the answers quickly learned to shut up and actually apply their own knowledge.

The first half of the questions were of technical nature, blunt questions that asked for functions of objects or a general way of living. The second half were shockingly hard by comparison – questions about behaviour in the company of Muggles or Wizards, questions about etiquette and proper communication with one or the other group. By the end, Harry's brain was half-fried and he was certain that he'd be ending up in the Muggle Culture class.

Sirius preferred to spend his time among wizards; Remus, on the other hand, was a Half-blood, whose Mum had been a Muggle, so what little Harry did know of the Muggle world, he'd learned from his pseudo-uncle. Apparently, that wasn't nearly enough for him to answer questions like 'how does one determine the tip given to a take-away deliverer' and 'what is considered inappropriate public behaviour in a Muggle neighbourhood'. Even with five to ten answers offered for each question, he ended up with the feeling that he'd gotten everything wrong.

Enya and Aoife collected the tests after the allotted time had passed, leaving the students with interestingly identical expressions of dismay on their faces. It seemed that most of the people would be ending up in one class or another.

"Now, then, children," Aoife said once the last parchment had flown through the air to land neatly on the stack in Enya's hands, "you are to remain here for the duration of the morning; Professor Kleinschuster will come speak with you about your language elective until lunch; I believe he will also administer a test of your current knowledge. "

"You are to be here promptly after lunch," Enya continued with a light nod, "at which time Madam Spinnet will tell you a little more about extra-curricular activities you might wish to participate in, as well as clubs that are organised each year and which you can join, should you have an interest for it."

"After she's done, we'll be sorting you into our classes and you will have your first lesson tomorrow. The schedule for the week might be a little out of whack, so be sure to check the message boards in your common rooms and ask either your most senior prefects or your Heads of Houses for any assistance, so that we can all have an easier week."

With those parting words, the two professors walked out, leaving the first-years to sit and chatter between themselves about the excitement of the day so far.

"That was an easy one," Seamus said as soon as the four Gryffindors had settled themselves close enough that they could talk without being overheard. "If all of them are this easy, it'll be a walk in the park!"

"What are you talking about?" Ron asked him, sounding somewhat upset, Harry was surprised to note. "I've never even heard of half of those things!"

"How _did_ you know to answer all the questions?" Dean questioned. "Because Ron's right; I had no idea about the proper answers to almost half of them. I mean, what is a Quibbler anyway?"

"It's this whacky magazine," Harry explained, "that always talks about things that don't even exist."

"Never mind that; who's Neal Armstrong and why would anyone know about him?"

Even Harry had to blink at his best friend at that question.

"You _seriously_ don't know who that is?"

"No, why should I? What's so important that he's ever done?"

"He's the first man who walked on the Moon," Seamus retorted, looking perplexed that someone _didn't_ know this little fact.

"Wait, he did what?"

"Walked on the Moon," Dean repeated. "It was like twenty years ago or something; Mum said that _all_ the telly stations were showing it. He said... _This is one small step for man, and one great leap for mankind_. Or something like that."

"How did he get to the Moon?" Ron asked, looking as bewildered as Harry had ever seen him. "And what's a tele?"

Seamus groaned, smacking his head with the palm of his hand. "We'll be here 'till Christmas if we have to explain every single thing to you; I'm sure you'll learn it in Muggle Culture, anyway."

"And, I still haven't gotten the answer to my question," Dean jumped in. "How do you know all this stuff, Seamus?"

"I told you last night, me dad's a Muggle; Mum and he always compete who's more interesting, so I got to know both sides pretty good."

"Lucky you," Harry said with a sigh. "I think I'll be going to Muggle Culture with Ron; the last time Sirius took me to any Muggle place was two years ago, to Gardaland."

"You got to go there?" Dean asked, eyes widening almost comically. "Man, I wish my mum would take me! I heard that only Disneyland in America is better."

"What's Gardaland?"

"It's an amusement park, in Italy," Harry explained. "They have these roller coaster rides, like Gringotts... ah, damn, I got that question wrong, too," he said, realising his mistaking an escalator with a roller coaster. "Oh, well. So, Gardaland–"

He was interrupted by the door opening, and he hissed at the other boys that he'd tell them everything later while they hurried back to their seats.

The man who entered appeared old, his hair greying; he wore sepia-coloured wizarding clothes, though the robes were shorter, reaching only to his knees, with a high, tight collar, and his trousers were tucked into a high pair of old-style men's boots, the sort of style Harry had seen worn on the continent. His hat was also different – it looked far more like a beret or a balaclava than a proper wizard's hat.

He waited until the students had settled, before stepping to the front of the classroom.

"Good day, pupils," he began, with an English tinged by a Germanic accent. "My name is Georg Kleinschuster and I will be your professor for your elected foreign language classes. Now, you have been informed that you would have to take one obligatory foreign language in your Hogwarts letter, and I expect that you have all decided on one of them; I am now informing you that if there are any who would like to learn Italian, that is also an option this year, as we've had demands from older years for it."

Granger raised her hand.

"Yes, Miss Granger?"

"Can we take more than one?"

"Certainly; I teach all classes, so they will not be overlapping. Now, those who wish to take a language they already know to an extent will have to take a test in a few minutes, so that I can sort you into groups based on your knowledge. Those who wish to take a language they've never learned before will, of course, be exempt from this." With a flick of his wand, he Summoned a long sheet of parchment, a quill and a pen, sending it floating towards the far left student in the first row – a Ravenclaw girl Harry couldn't remember the name of; so much for memorising everyone last night. "Now, if you would write your name, your chosen classes and whether you have prior knowledge, we can move on from this portion of today's meeting."

Sally-Anne Perks, a Gryffindor girl with a pixie haircut and wide-set eyes, raised her hand.

"Yes, Miss Perks?"

"What if we choose wrong? Can we switch?"

"Yes, you are allowed to switch next year," the professor answered. "The requirement is for all of you to take at least one foreign language, and naturally it is expected that you would be taking the same language through your seven years of schooling. You will have the opportunity from fifth year on to take Muggle language certificate exams and obtain a diploma stating your level of proficiency in your chosen language, which are often requirements, should you choose to continue your education in a different country. Seven years is more than enough for you to become competent speakers."

"But, if we switch to a language we've not learned before, then does that mean we'll have classes with younger kids?" Hannah Abbot, the Hufflepuff girl who'd been sorted first, asked.

"It is polite to raise your hand and wait for permission before speaking, Miss Abbot," Kleinschuster admonished, making the girl blush to the roots of her hair. "And, perhaps I have been remiss in informing you of this – you will be taking these classes with all the other students of the same level as you. This means that, if you know the basics of a language, you will most likely be in a class that primarily consists of third-years who had started learning it with no prior knowledge. Similarly, if you choose to begin learning a new language in your later schooling years, you would probably be in a group with first- and second-years."

He allowed the murmurs of conversation as the students discussed this reveal among themselves; personally, Harry didn't think much on it one way or another. He doubted he'd _want_ to take a second foreign language, and especially not after third year, when they were required to begin taking electives of other sorts, and if he had to share his class with older students, then so what? Perhaps it was because the people he spent most of his time with were both adults, but Harry had no problem socialising with people older than himself. Younger were the problem, not the older.

When the paper reached him, he dithered for a moment, then saw that Draco Malfoy had written down French, and decided that Italian was the language for him. He could just take French next year if Italian turned out to be boring, when Malfoy would be ahead and he wouldn't have to deal with him.

He ran through the names briefly, picking out who'd chosen what – Snape had chosen German, Neville had taken Italian as well, Granger had taken French, Italian, German and Sp– she'd taken _all four_? Was the girl mad?

"Hey, what're you taking?" Ron asked him, elbowing him lightly to draw his attention.

"Italian," he answered. "You?"

"I was thinking Spanish, but I heard Italian was the easiest, so I'm going with you on that one."

"And the other two?" he asked, since Dean and Seamus were to Ron's other side, too far from Harry to ask them directly.

"Seamus wants Spanish, and Dean wants German, although they're conferring on it, so I think they'll end up choosing the same one."

"Look at this," Harry whispered, pointing to Granger's name. "She took four."

" _Four_? What, all of them?"

"Apparently."

"I don't know, mate, that girl seems more and more insane to me," Ron said with a sniff.

Harry shrugged his shoulders and wrote down 'Italian' and 'no prior knowledge' in the proper spots, then passed on the parchment and writing utensils to Ron, tuning back to what the professor was saying.

"–Will naturally be moved to a higher class; not all people have the same affinity for languages. Some will struggle through for years, while others may pick it up in months. It truly depends on the student."

Harry raised his hand, and the professor gave him permission to speak.

"I was wondering, sir, how many languages do you speak?"

"I speak eight fluently – English, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian – and I am well-versed in Latin, as well. I can also speak partial Swedish, have some understanding of the Southern Slavic languages of the now former Yugoslavia, and a little Gaelic. I have also begun dabbling in the Far Eastern languages, Mandarin and Japanese, though this is only an academic pursuit at present."

"Wow," Padma Petil, the Ravenclaw twin, breathed out. "How did you manage to learn all of those?"

The man gave a rueful smile. "Ah, needs must, Miss Petil. It was either moving out of the way of Nazis or concentration camp; and, of course, avoiding Grindelwald. I spent my childhood travelling Europe."

A hush fell over the room as the students finally grasped the finer points of these two sentences, whether it be from the Muggle or from the wizarding side – they all knew the atrocities committed by their respective dark parties of that time period.

"Yes, Mr Entwhistle?"

"Are you a Jew?" the Ravenclaw boy asked.

"Indeed I am; and to forestall any further questions, I do believe in _HaShem_ , I celebrate Hanukkah, rather than Christmas, and yes, you may still buy me socks as a holiday present. Oh, apologies, that is our Headmaster's preferred gift."

Harry sniggered, and the other students laughed outright; Kleinschuster smiled with them, and the smile made him seem less like a stuck-up nobleman and far more like an approachable librarian.

He collected the parchment and sent those students with no language knowledge out to early lunch, while the rest of the students chose their writing implements and got cracking on the placement tests. Harry and his new friends trotted down to the Great Hall, loudly discussing the day's developments all the way.

* * *

"Miss Granger, if you would stay a minute?" Professor Kleinschuster asked as the last of the students handed in their placement tests and drifted towards the exit. Hermione Granger stopped in her steps and turned to the man addressing her, already half-guessing what it was that he wanted to talk to her about.

"Yes, Professor?"

"I see that you've a wish to take all of the offered languages?"

"Yes, sir," she confirmed. "I learned French in primary, and I've been studying Spanish over the summer, but I really want to learn Italian, and German is in the same language family as English, so it shouldn't be too difficult."

"Perhaps, Miss Granger, you are overestimating your, ah, temporal availability?"

Hermione blinked owlishly at him, not quite certain what he was referring to.

"I'm not certain that you would have enough time for all of these," he rephrased, completely unnecessarily, since that still didn't explain his words.

"I understood what you meant, sir, I'm just not sure why you think I couldn't manage all of it?"

"Do you intend to spend your free time studying?"

"That's how I usually spend it," she answered, shrugging lightly.

"Do you not wish to spend it with your friends or housemates?"

"I, erm, I'm not really sure that _they'd_ want to spend time with _me_ ," she answered cagily, already not liking where this discussion was going. So far she'd not really gotten to know any of the other ten girls and boys sorted into Ravenclaw with her, which was right par for the course – she'd not had any friends in primary school, either. For one reason or another, people just didn't like her, and no matter how much she railed against the unfairness of it, that was how it was.

She thought that she would see a pitying look on the man's face, but what she got was a reserved acceptance instead, which made her feel ridiculously relieved. She _hated_ being pitied.

"Very well; you can begin with all of the languages, and if you find that you cannot keep up for any reason whatsoever, you will be allowed to drop them. I assume you are a, ah, _Zauberlosgeboren..._ a Magicless-born."

"Yes, sir. Is it that obvious?"

"Most Magicless-borns have the same look in their eyes during their first week," the man said with a kind smile. "I cannot promise that people are any different here than they were in the nonmagical world, but I do believe that if you search hard enough, you _will_ find at least one person who is. My advice is that you leave some time in the day for this, Miss Granger; you might actually be successful."

"Was it hard for you to find that person?" she blurted out before she could think on her words, then blushed red for the slip-up. The professor didn't seem to mind.

"It had taken me about forty-five years, and she is quite a bit younger than I, but yes, I have."

"I, ah, thank you, sir. And thank you for letting me take all of the classes."

"You are quite welcome, Miss Granger."

* * *

Georgette Spinnet was a relatively plain-looking woman in late twenties, or maybe early thirties. Evan couldn't be sure; she had that sort of face that didn't lend itself well to estimating age. Her hair was a lighter brown, her eyes were something between hazel and chocolate, and her skin was a sort of coffee-with-milk that didn't really fall into either spectrum.

In all, she was the least noticeable person Evan had ever seen.

"We have some time to fill until Professors MacCracken and Mac Reachtain finish your placements, so I would like to talk with you today about your free time while you are here at Hogwarts," she began after having introduced herself. She'd said that she would be their Apparition and Driving instructor in their sixth and seventh year, but as that was too far away to even imagine, no one had paid much attention to it. "Now, as you all know, there is a Quidditch tournament between houses organised each year; this is, of course, primarily restricted to those students who are on house teams."

Potter raised his hand. Of course he would, Evan thought testily. Sometimes it felt like nothing in the wizarding world was as sacred as Quidditch.

"Yes, Mr Potter?"

"How can we get on the Quidditch teams?"

"Well, from second year onwards, you are free to attend try-outs. First-years need special dispensation given by their flying instructor, their Head of House and the Headmaster himself, in addition to written consent by their guardians, which is a requirement for all team members. I don't believe that any first-year has been on the Quidditch team in at least thirty-five years."

Some students grumbled, though most seemed to be relatively uninterested.

"You will have flying lessons, for all those who are not proficient on a broom," Madam Spinnet continued. "And, as of this year, there will be a Flight Club organised for those who could not be on the Quidditch team but still wished to play the game in their free time."

A loud 'yes', along with some hollering, came from the student populace of the room. Evan had no particular interest in that or any other sport, so he just rolled his eyes and wished the woman could finish this part of her talk faster.

"Aside from that, you will have a one-semester Muggle Sports class from next week until the Christmas holidays, with various sports clubs available for your interest. You are under no obligation to join any, of course, but in my experience, most witches and wizards find that they quite enjoy the challenges that come with these clubs, not to mention that physical activity is a healthy way of spending some of your free time."

A Hufflepuff boy whose name Evan had forgotten raised his hand.

"Yes, Mr Macmillan?"

And just how _did_ the professors know everyone's name after only seeing them the day before, during sorting?

"I, erm, I don't really know any Muggle sports, ma'am."

"That is quite all right," Madam Spinnet assured him with a gentle smile. "That is why you have the class. And, of course, you can always ask your fellow students who are more knowledgeable of the Muggle world; I'm certain they would be happy to give you some idea as to the topic. While Quidditch is the only wizarding sport generally practiced in the country, you will find that there are many Muggle sports, both individual and group ones. There is no need to stress about it; you are free to join any club you wish throughout the whole year, and they are rather more informal than the official Quidditch teams. Now, for those of you who would rather choose a more intellectual occupation, there is also a number of clubs that you might wish to join, both magical and non-magical in topic. I have separated the sports from these because the sports clubs are all under supervision of Madam Hooch, your flight instructor, and you should expect further information on the topic from her as of next week. The rest of the clubs and societies are organised by the respective professors of interest, and, in some cases, N.E.W.T. students; those would be the sixth- and seventh-years. I have here the full list of clubs," she said, sending the stack of pamphlets she'd brought with her flying through the classroom to land in front of each student. Evan opened his with some interest, finding that it mostly consisted of a list of available clubs with their supervisors in the brackets after the names. "You are young witches and wizards able to practice your magic formally now, so I suggest you play around with these; there is quite a bit of information contained in them, if you are truly interested in finding it."

Evan assumed that meant there was some way of bringing out detailed descriptions of each club. He'd have to see about that after dinner.

The rustling of paper and clothes made him look up to see that quite a few of the students had had the same idea as he did, only they'd not decided to wait until later to see if it was true. Some were twisting the papers around and inspecting them from all sides; others were pulling out their wands and frowning down at their own pamphlets, obviously thinking on how they might activate the hidden features.

"Children!" Madam Spinnet exclaimed, making everyone freeze and look at her. "We do not have enough time for you to do so now; you will have the rest of the week before any of the sign-up sheets are posted. So, put the pamphlets away and please pay attention; there is still quite a bit of material left to go through."

The students subsided and she gave them a thankful smile as a reward.

"Now, some information about other extra-curricular activities, though these will be of more interest to you in the coming years."

The whole thing boiled down to this – third-year and up could go to Hogsmeade Village one Saturday a month, and there was a one-day educational excursion organised each year tied to their curriculum, that students had to pay for themselves. Madam Spinnet urged them to contribute to the donation fund for those who couldn't afford these trips. They could also participate in an exchange programme for one or two semesters in their N.E.W.T. years at another magical school, though they were obligated to finish their N.E.W.T.s back home, and, in addition, there was also a one-week trip to the continent organised for sixth-years, again not cost-free. In all, that sounded like a heck of a lot more travel than Evan's parents had seen, and it in fact sounded quite intriguing. Doing a semester abroad wasn't a bad idea at all.

"Now, moving on," Madam Spinnet continued, switching to another topic, "you will have elective classes from your third year; more information on them will be given to you at the end of your second year. You really must notify the school before the beginning of your third year, so that the schedules can be accommodated for those who wish to take more than is the normal load, which is on average six. Three is minimal."

"That's a lot of classes," a Hufflepuff boy noted dubiously; Evan thought that he was one of the Smiths.

"It is true that you have a much higher number of classes than we did in my time," Madam Spinnet allowed (and wasn't _that_ an understatement – Evan's parents had had only magical subjects, whereas these days, there were additional non-magical ones that Evan had once hoped to leave back in primary school), "but not only are many of the new classes, especially those that are purely intellectual in nature, absolutely necessary if you are to be well-rounded individuals with their options open in the future, I believe that the updated curriculum for the old classes gives you enough room to comfortably attend to all of your lectures if you are willing to study concurrently with the new material; for those who prefer to cram at the end of the school year, it will of course be much harder to achieve everything. But, as first-years, you are primarily expected to adjust to the more demanding schedule and to learn the very basics; for this year, due diligence will be quite enough to pass. I am aware that this feels very much like we are expecting too much of you," she said with an understanding look. "But that is only because there are many options open to you; you do not need to join any of the extra-curriculars, naturally, though I think it would be beneficial. There are usually study groups organised in the later part of the school year for those who have troubles with some of their classes, and the staff are all very much available for anything you may need. But you must understand, children, that you have come to Hogwarts to learn and educate yourselves, and that we expect you to keep up with the demands. You are now old enough to do so, and this is the responsibility we've entrusted you with. So I hope that you will not be quick to disappoint us."

The self-important murmurs of 'no, ma'am' and 'we won't' made Evan smirk. Really, that was a very nice move on Madam Spinnet's part. His mother had always been of the opinion that giving children responsibility (appropriate for their age, naturally) was a way of teaching them to know the consequences of their own actions. He still remembered the first time his father had let him brew mostly on his own (with supervision; his parents were neither negligent nor homicidal, even disregarding the magical aspect of potion-making he hadn't been able to do that young), when he was six; he'd told Evan: 'I am trusting you to know what you are doing, and to come to me if you aren't certain'. He'd vowed that day, in his little six-year-old mind, that he'd never ever disappoint his father. And so he'd learned how to properly brew and what to keep in mind at all times during the activity.

It was the same with other kids, and it seemed to him that Madam Spinnet knew this perfectly. The sneaky way she'd gone about it, turning the bother of having so many classes into something to be proud of, that took some skill; Evan decided he liked her.

In fact, so far, he'd liked all four of their professors. Professor Kleinschuster had seemed very stiff and formal, until he'd made the joke about the woolly socks, and then he'd changed from a stern, somewhat unapproachable adult into a liked teacher, someone who was a little stiff at times, but could still laugh with his students and reveal personal facts about himself without getting prissy. Professors MacCracken and Mac Reachtain had achieved the same effect simply by their physical looks, age and words like 'kiddies' and 'Padawans'. Evan had never really had an interest in _Star Wars_ , it wasn't his cup of tea, but he'd understood the reference enough to find it amusing. He just kept returning to the fact that they were obviously twins, yet had different last names. Or, not different, he mused to himself, but rather similar last names in differing forms. There was a story behind that, and he was certain he'd be able to find out sooner or later.

The two entered the room just when Madam Spinnet had finished speaking, and they had a thin stack of papers with them.

"Right on time; I've just finished my explanations. Should any of you have any further questions regarding the non-obligatory aspects of your education, please come to me; I will be happy to answer in the best way I can," Madam Spinnet said, addressing the classroom. Then she gave them a smile, said she'd see them at dinner, and left the room, leaving the front of it to Professors MacCracken and Mac Reachtain.

"I hope you've gotten a feel for what's expecting you in the coming years," Professor MacCracken began, leaning against the desk lightly. "We've checked your tests, and assigned you to your classes; they'll take place at the same time, since there is no overlap, and as the class is the first one in the morning, those lucky, lucky few of you–"

"Ten of you, to be precise," Professor Mac Reachtain cut in.

"–Will be free to sleep longer; I'm certain that the house-elves will be more than happy to have some of the breakfast food saved for the late sleepers."

"They always did for us, at least."

"Aside from that, we have here your week's schedules. You know that the upper years are doing their revision tests this week, so the schedule is still in flux, but we've talked to all your professors over lunch, and we've come up with the time to introduce you to all of the subjects throughout the week."

"Your Heads of Houses will let you know on Sunday what your actual year's schedules will be, so don't get attached to these."

Professor Mac Reachtain sent out the papers through the classroom, and Evan plucked his own out of the air. The top left corner was marked 'Slytherin', and it seemed that he'd be having most of his classes either early in the morning or after lunch. The breakfast was from seven to eight, and the first class of the day began at eight, a little earlier than the meet today had. Classes lasted for forty-five minutes, and they had ten minutes between each, no doubt to get through the castle. Evan had not had time to study the map of Hogwarts hung in the common room yet, but he rather thought his mother had mentioned once about relocating the classrooms closer together to ease the travel time.

This week, they would be having the Culture classes followed by Ethics Class every morning, though Evan suspected it was only for this week, to get them ahead; aside from that, they had one, two, three, four... wow, fourteen subjects; seven of them were obviously magical in nature, counting ethics, and seven, including culture classes, were not. Potions was the only class, aside from Culture and Ethics, that they had more than one of this week, a double period with Gryffindors; the others were also divided between the houses, and, thankfully, none of them were with that particular house; Evan got the chills just thinking of the four Lions banding together as they seemed to be.

The conversation in the room had picked up, and Evan caught the Ravenclaw girl with wild hair talking about how they'd had only ten in primary school, but that she preferred it this way. He rolled his eyes; the girl clearly didn't know when to shut her mouth. He'd had ten subjects in primary school, as well, but he couldn't very well imagine that, with both magical and non-magical subjects, that trend would continue. He, personally, also didn't mind it, though he suspected that many would. Oh, well, they'd learn to get over it.

"Kiddies, settle down," Professor Mac Reachtain yelled out, and it took a moment, but the class did subside. No doubt they'd be easier to manage when there was twenty of them, rather than forty. "Now, we'll read out who was placed in which class, so if you want to know where to go first thing tomorrow morning, I suggest that you pay attention. Abbot, Hannah, Muggle Culture; Bones, Susan, Muggle Culture..."

They continued on in that manner and Evan noted those people of interest to him: Millicent Bulstrode, Tracey Davis and he himself were exempt, Lily Moon was to take Wizard Culture, and the rest of the Slyths, seven in total, were taking Muggle Culture. No surprise there. Of the others, Potter and Weasley were placed in Muggle Culture, Thomas was in Wizard Culture, and, surprisingly, Finnigan was also exempt. The loud Ravenclaw girl, Granger, was to take Wizard Culture, which was par for the course since he thought he'd picked up that she was Muggle-born. In general, Muggle Culture seemed to be by far the bigger of the two classes.

"The lists will be posted in your common rooms tonight, just in case you've missed it. Make sure to bring appropriate utensils; there will be no writing with pens and papers in Wizard Class and no quills and parchments in Muggle Class, is that understood? Good. Then, you are dismissed."

He ended up sitting with Tracey Davis and Theodore Nott over dinner, debating on the benefits of individual classes and trying not to gloat that he'd been let off, since Nott had been placed in Muggle Culture. Davis didn't have that compunction; she was quite pleased with herself, and in the course of the conversation, Evan learned that her father was a Muggle-born Slytherin who'd seen the very good point of having his daughter grow up with frequent visits to her Muggle grandparents, which meant that they had at least one topic that gave them equal footing. The three parted after dinner with the understanding that they weren't friends, but that they could still spend a pleasant enough time together, which, considering it was their second day, made Evan quite pleased. If today was anything to go by, the Hogwarts time was promising to be exciting, and for all his eye-rolling at the Ravenclaw girl, he was thoroughly looking forward to it.


	6. Ch 5: The Kingdom and Its King

**A/N:** Some new OCs are introduced in this chapter; suffice it to say, they're all professors and will thus appear in future chapters accordingly (meaning only as much as the main characters interact with them). They're a necessary consequence of the schooling changes implemented, and ultimately serve to give a fuller political backstory to them, rather than impact the plot.

Additionally, the second part of the chapter presumes the reader knows Dumbledore's backstory as presented in the DH (I'm considering JKR interviews on the topic also canon, but it's really unimportant in the grand scheme of things, so for those who prefer to think of e.g. Dumbledore's non-platonic feelings for Grindelwald as non-canon, it should be easy to disregard). If you don't know the story of Albus, Ariana, Grindelwald and Aberforth (for whatever reason), all info is easily found on harrypotter wikia, which I use as a big source in lieu of digging through books and Pottermore).

 **Chapter 5: The Kingdom and Its King**

The first day of classes was always different to the rest of the schoolyear. It hadn't always been. Before the Wizarding War, it had been very much alike to all the rest of them; the only difference had been that the students had received their timetables at breakfast.

This practice had been one of the first to go when the reformation had begun.

Lily Evans had been the first to organise Muggle-born wizards after the War, though she wasn't by far the first Muggle-born dissatisfied with the situation of the Wizarding Britain in general. All that had taken was being a little proactive and having good backing in the form of one Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, for the Muggle-borns to form a Coalition for Muggle-Born Witches and Wizards, a group originally formed as a union that clamoured, very loudly, for changes to be made to the wizarding political system.

One of the main reasons why their initial campaign had been a success was the discovery of quite a few people associated with Voldemort in the higher echelons of the Ministry, highly-placed Pure-blooded witches and wizards with money and influence, who'd been long held as the representatives of what Wizarding Britain ought to have been – namely, people such as Lucius Malfoy and Thanael Nott. Though even the Wizengamot had been unable to properly ascertain their connections to the Death Eater faction, where once their reputations had been their swords and shields, directly after the war they'd become quite effective social nooses. This, combined with the scandal of Barty Crouch's son being one of the most loyal Death Eaters, had led to a widespread distrust towards the government, and allowed for a strong push of the new tide – that of the disenfranchised.

In less than a year, the CMB had grown from a union into a political party, a new concept in the wizarding society, and one that had proven immensely popular with almost the whole populace, and especially the younger generations in their early to mid-twenties, who'd lived their formative years under threat of the War, but had, paradoxically, also lived through the social and popular culture revolutions sweeping the Muggle world, and so held a little more understanding of the political concepts practiced outside of Wizarding Britain than the older generations. The exception to this had been the conservative Pure-bloods, who'd been forced to cede some of their power in the process. The following two years had seen the formation of at least a dozen other parties, the most prominent among them the Werewolf Unionist Faction and the Goblin National Party, two groups that were the progenitors of the Equal Rights Coalition (that now included various other parties led by other magical beings).

To say that the political climate remained in flux for the next decade was an understatement. Lily had found this to be an extremely useful tool in pursuing what she had felt was the best course of action – improving the schooling system. As the CMB Party Leader from 1981 to 1985, she'd managed to push through the formation of a companion body to the Hogwarts Board of Governors – the Hogwarts Council of Supervisors. In direct contrast to the Pure-blooded, retrograde Board, the Council was composed mainly of Muggle-born and Half-blood progressives who, having grown up among the Muggle populace of Britain, understood the fundamental flaw of Hogwarts education – it created near-total isolation of the young wizarding generations from the Muggle world. Having finished Hogwarts, the students had no knowledge that would allow them to pursue any career in the Muggle world, and many didn't even understand how they were supposed to interact with it, let alone exist in it.

Lily firmly believed, and her belief was shared by a good sixty percent of the British wizarding population (once they'd been given a push in declaring themselves), that by distancing themselves from the Muggle world, the wizarding society was not only propagating the false belief that Muggles were a race of lower beings, but that it was, in fact, destroying itself one generation at a time. Where the Cold War had forced the wizarding society of the US towards cooperation with the Muggle populace, the benefits of which the country was reaping now as the emerging superpower of the world, the British wizarding society was dogmatically holding onto the worldviews that had been long since left behind by the British Muggle population, and that would, in the end, result in a collapse of their whole way of life.

Millicent Bagnold, hard-pressed to maintain her position as the Minister for Magic with the rise of the disenfranchised, had backed up the formation of the Council of Supervisors, and Dumbledore, as the Hogwarts Headmaster of more than forty years, had agreed to the terms the Board of Governors had set as the condition for sharing their position, namely that half of both bodies was enough for a vote-of-no-confidence on his position, as well as that full two-thirds of the Board (which amounted to eight out of twelve members) were needed for any suggestion of the Council to be passed into effect. Lily had waited only long enough for things to calm down and Regulus Black to fill the Black seat on the Board to push for the same power. With the Pure-blood and Half-blood parties that held the progressive stance breathing down the Board's neck, Regulus had managed to win exactly eight votes, and thus the Council had finally received equal share of the power over the schooling system.

This marked the end of the Old Hogwarts Era. The schooling reforms began by discontinuing the old classes system (where the classes were shared by two Houses each) in all but the first year, and replacing it with average and advanced classes shared by all four houses. The few suggestions about possibly completely replacing the House system had, unsurprisingly, been without success, though not without a voice. Privately, Severus had managed to push and prod Dumbledore enough that the man had begun tinkering and conspiring with the Sorting Hat to allow for a greater variability in the Sorting, though this little project was as yet still in infancy.

The second reform wave came in the form of mandatory Culture classes: Muggle Culture for those who showed below-average knowledge of the Muggle world, and Wizard Culture for those with below-average knowledge of the wizarding world. These were further supplanted with Cultural Respect (which dealt with proper behaviour towards other beings such as centaurs and goblins), Health and First Aid, Sociology, Science, English and Mathematics, as well as Latin and three other foreign languages – German, French and Spanish – of which one was obligatory. Driving was a companion class added to Apparition, and other classes, such as Astronomy (shifted to elective from third year and above), The Arts, Comparative History, Studies in Technology (which replaced Muggle Studies), Magical Theory and Magical Evolution, were added as electives available from the third year on. A hard-won victory that closed out this reform was the Ethics class that primarily focused on teaching children why misuse of their power was a no-no (this had been a hard point of contention, considering how easy it was to bully with simple every-day spells).

The third push on the reforms, the one still ongoing, wasn't focused directly on Hogwarts as it was, but rather on expanding the schooling system through informing Muggle-borns of their position in the wizarding society after their first display of accidental magic rather than several months before the beginning of their first year at Hogwarts, opening Hogwarts-adjunct wizarding primary schools with the focus on teaching young children to sense their magical cores and learn basic wandless control, organizing summer practicals for Muggle-borns and those who were otherwise prohibited from exercising their magic because of the underage restrictions on magic use, pushing for increased opportunities of magical masteries for post-Hogwarts education and even cooperation with well-established Muggle universities for dual degrees, and regular updating of the curriculum and staff of the school.

As a result, the beginning of the schoolyear had to be adjusted to accommodate for all the changes implemented in the last decade. This was why the faculty of twenty-five witches and wizards was beginning to gather in the main conference room after dinner on Monday, September 2nd, most of them looking quite exhausted and very happy that the day had drawn to an end.

Headmaster Albus Dumbledore had the honorary position at the head of the long table, where he currently sat, drinking his tea and deliberating on the current schooling budget. Its revision should have been done at the beginning of the year, but, as it usually happened in an election year, the Board of Governors was hesitant to act until the political climate had fully solidified, especially with Minister Bagnold stepping down. As a consequence, the budget had _still_ not been properly adjusted to allow for what the school was beginning to desperately need – namely, more teachers.

His Heads of Houses sat around him: Transfiguration professor Minerva McGonagall, Herbology professor Pomona Sprout, Charms professor Filius Flitwick and Potions professor Horace Slughorn; they were currently discussing their youngest years and when it would be best to organise the one-on-one interviews they would be conducting. The concept itself had never been new, but the practice of it had become better implemented throughout the last ten years, as it allowed them to establish the basics of trust between them and the students, and at the same time determine whether there were some who had psychological or family issues.

Those who'd had a light load today were already there, chatting amongst themselves. Rubeus Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundskeeper, was involved in a rather lively and very loud discussion with Silvanus Kettleburn, Care for Magical Creatures professor, who, due to a lack of one and a half legs and an arm, had some trouble moving around the castle and usually stuck to his ground floor apartment and classroom. They were usually the first in, Hagrid pushing Kettleburn's wheelchair, and they were always in some deep discussion or other about creatures that were far too dangerous to be kept as pets.

To their left, Poppy Pomfrey was pouring tea for the Divinations professor Sybill Trelawney, nodding lightly at the other woman's almost agitated whispers; of all the professors, Trelawney always had the most difficulty preparing for the tests. Poppy, who'd, in addition to her matron duties, taken over teaching Health and First Aid, a class held every first Saturday of the month, and thus had some experience with teaching unruly children about things like sexually transmitted diseases and proper disinfection of wounds, had years ago stepped in to lend a hand to the scatter-brained soothsayer, for which most of the remaining faculty were beyond grateful.

Georgette Spinnet was seated on Hagrid's other side, listening with a light smile to Rolanda Hooch. As those who had the most dealings with the extracurricular aspects of the schooling, they'd always tended to band together, not least because Georgette didn't seem to mind Rolanda's rather loud complaints about almost anything she could think of. Currently, the flight instructor was griping on about the fact that the Council had pushed through on their idea of creating a Flight Club, and how that would only detract from the importance of the official Quidditch School Championship. Like Poppy, Georgette had a sort of peace-keeping role in the group, and had, more than once, gotten sincere gratitude for doing it.

"...Truly necessary to take _five points_?" Kyla Slora's voice came as she entered the room, in the company of the twins; Enya MacCraken was rolling her eyes, while Aoife Mac Reachtain seemed to have a resigned expression on her face.

"The kid's a snot, Kyla," Enya replied. "If I hadn't done it, I'd have to suffer for the rest of the school year for it."

"You'll have to suffer Lucius if you don't watch yourself."

Enya snorted in derision. "Like I'm afraid of _him_."

"You would be, if you knew what's good for you. He may not have the sort of power his father had, but Lucius is not to be underestimated. Things are bound to change with this election, and Hogwarts will feel it just as much as the rest of the Wizarding Britain."

"It's just some House points, Kyla, not the seat on the Wizengamot."

"To be fair, _Deirfiúr_ , five _is_ a little excessive," Aoife pointed out as the three took their seats farthest from the Elder Corner (as was the name for the head of the table).

"Like it matters; in two or three years, they'll care about the Cup as much as the rest of the school does these days, meaning not at all," Enya retorted.

"That is true," Kyla agreed dryly. "It's nice to know at least one time-honoured tradition of this school has been stamped out in just six years of your tenure."

Enya, maturely, stuck out her tongue at the older woman, and Kyla gave her a disgusted look. A contemporary of Lucius Malfoy, Kyla Slora was a tall, willowy woman in mid-thirties, with rich copper-brown hair and light green eyes. Like Trelawney's and the twins', her posting as the Alchemy and Latin professor had come about more due to necessity than her interest in teaching: One of the only two living members of the oldest Scottish wizarding family, she was a Slytherin who'd lost her Death Eater husband during the War, as well as the next to last of her blood family, an Order member Half-blood cousin. Dumbledore had offered her sanctuary in the school amidst inquiries into her husband's death and a prolonged and difficult illness, on the heels of which followed the acquisition of the guardianship over her late cousin's new-born daughter. Though initially uncomfortable in the position of a professor, she'd over the years stepped into the unofficial role of the Deputy Head of Slytherin House as more and more students chose to come to her, rather than Slughorn.

She'd actually taught at the school during the last years of the twins' education; ever the inquisitive Ravenclaw, Aoife had taken her Alchemy class as an elective and had had the pleasure of witnessing first-hand Kyla's initial hesitant steps towards a competent instructor, while the more mischievous Enya had been one of the first to consider her Horace Slughorn's substitute. Needless to say, Kyla had always thought the girls a little too hyperactive, but as someone who'd had to weather difficult family times, she _was_ glad they'd found each other.

One raised by their Muggle mother in the Muggle world and the other by their Pure-blooded father in the wizarding world, Enya and Aoife had only learned of each-other's existence after arriving at Hogwarts. Enya had figured things out the very first night, not least because one of her favourite movies had been Disney's _The Parent Trap_ , and even though they'd ended up sorted in different houses, the girls had rarely been seen separated since. This was, in fact, part of the reason why Dumbledore had offered them the then-newly-formed Culture instructor positions less than two years after they'd left Hogwarts: the hatred between their parents ran so deep the girls had been forced to cut ties with them in order to be together.

"What is this about taking points?" Georgette asked in one of Rolanda's moments of silence.

"Oh, Malfoy tried to invoke his daddy on me," Enya explained. "So I took five points, as a lesson."

"That sounds a little excessive," Pomona noted with some doubt. The younger professor only shrugged.

"I don't appreciate people who rub their social status in my face."

Not something that needed to be mentioned; though technically a Half-blood, Enya had remained known as one of the few Slytherin Muggle-borns, for which she'd had to suffer more than one rather loud objection, to say the least. As a consequence, she didn't look favourably on her students attempting anything of the kind; unfortunately, it was not exactly a rare occurrence, considering that she taught Muggle Culture to a class consisting of at least seventy percent Pure-blood children.

"What is this about taking points on the first day?" a feminine voice asked as the door opened and Hogwarts' only married couple stepped in. Enya gave a bright smile to Elena Kleinschuster and beckoned both her and her husband Georg to join the three of them.

"The usual," Aoife explained. "It was a Slytherin, in any case, not any of your Badgers."

Elena was a relatively unnoticeable blonde woman in early forties, a Half-blood witch who'd gone to Hogwarts in the same generation as Molly Weasley and taught English and Ethics classes, with grey eyes and an extremely pudgy nose that made her face look somewhat squished, like that of a Persian cat. She gave a small smile to the twins and a reserved nod to Kyla before taking her seat; Georg followed suit. Eighteen years his wife's senior, he was a well-proportioned, regal-looking wizard whose receding hairline contrasted sharply with his thick greying hair at the back of his head. A Muggle-born Jew, he'd survived the Holocaust and Grindelwald's terror by moving all through Europe; his education, therefore, had been generally uneven and oriented far more towards survival and defence than that of the British wizarding children, which made him not only a polyglot but also a formidable dueller. Like Enya, who tended to make a statement with her deliberate choice of Muggle clothing, Georg was rather partial to a more relaxed dress code; though he wore today the typical German-style robes, he was more often than not found in simple trousers and a button-down shirt.

"I'm certain that he would have been more begrudged ten years ago for it," Elena decided.

"Oh, his housemates looked plenty angry to me," Enya assured her. "Though you're right, of course; the older years won't even notice it."

"It continues to amaze me that you find it so entertaining," Kyla noted to the two.

"What's that?"

"How a schooling system established for a thousand years keeps getting turned on its head and shedding a millennium-worth of traditions like they are last year's leaves."

"Because old is always better, isn't it, Kyla?" Elena asked blandly; she was possibly the only one who could have made a bitter reproach like that sound like a mild observation.

"When the change comes at the cost of tradition," Kyla answered with a lifted eyebrow.

"Then I suppose only those who _have_ such traditions feel their loss after the change," the blonde answered.

There was no real love lost between the two women, mostly because Kyla had associated with the same group of Slytherins – and who'd largely gone on to become high-ranking Death Eaters – who had enjoyed bullying the Half-blood Hufflepuff. It was no surprise that the initial years of Elena's tenure at Hogwarts had been wrought with tension between the two. Even so, over the years, the antagonism had, nigh on unnoticeably, morphed into a congenial familiarity with quite a bit of barbed words and a surprising amount of companionship that not a single person who knew them, including Elena's husband Georg and Kyla's adopted daughter Sivney, could fully explain.

Kyla's response was interrupted by the entrance of the next contingent of the faculty; the three men that entered were the last of the newly hired lot, and when viewed together, they presented a rather amusing sight, one being short and small, another being rather heavy-set and of wide shoulders, and the third a tall, reedy presence. They entered the room already in a discussion about what was certain to be the largest topic of conversation: the problem of too many classes and too few professors.

"Good evening, gentlemen," Minerva said pointedly, clearly wishing to roll her eyes at her much younger colleagues. When they got started, they had a nasty tendency to completely ignore their surroundings.

"Evening, ladies, gents," Will Florrel greeted in his pronounced Bostonian accent. Of the three, he was by far the most dashing one, tall and thin, with a long face and a forehead covered by voluminous dark locks, though a cleft lip scar gave a rather discomforting first impression. He'd been lured away from Harvard adjunct professorship position by the posting of the Science and Magical Evolution classes professor, though he was always quick enough to admit that he'd accepted it primarily so that he could be on hand to his ailing grandmother, who'd remained in Britain when his parents had moved to the States. "Are we the last ones again?"

"Not this time," Poppy answered. "Do sit down and tell me how Justine's doing. I haven't gotten any letters from her in weeks." Poppy had been school friends with Will's grandmother, and had been the one to suggest him when the position had first been created six years ago. The man did as he was bid, giving the other two men a sardonic, if languid salute.

The other two chose to sit on the other side, next to Horace and Pomona.

"I must admit I abhor this first week of classes," Dr Achilles Ajax said with a sigh. "As necessary as it is, it is truly exhausting."

The powerfully-built Yorkshire native was, in contrast to Will Florrel, very pale in colouring, with his blonde hair and blue eyes. He was a Pure-blood who'd never attended Hogwarts, having instead been raised by his Squib great-aunt who'd employed private tutors for him while he'd finished his Muggle schooling. Though it meant little to many wizards, Achilles had earned a doctorate in sociology from Oxford and was regarded as one of the foremost British experts in the field in the Muggle world. His reputation as a recluse had allowed him to teach as a Sociology and Arts professor at the school he himself hadn't attended, and his relatively light load of classes (comparatively speaking, anyway) meant that he had some time to be involved with the organisation of those extracurricular clubs and classes directed more towards the non-magical topics, where Georgette Spinnet dealt with the more magical ones. Primarily, this involved things like chess club and lessons in various instruments, but also computer science, communication technologies and other things that could not be taught at Hogwarts for the pesky problem of too much magical energy that disrupted all electronic devices. The two often coordinated with those professors who had chosen to oversee art clubs of special interest to them – Filius, the choir; Enya and Aoife, photography and film; Aurora Sinistra, the theatre group – as well as Rolanda, who was in charge of sports clubs, and Georg, who organised practice groups for the many languages he taught.

For all his many obligations, however, he was most often found in the company of Heron Birdwhistle, the third member of the little party who'd entered last.

Heron Birdwhistle was a small man of rather short stature, with somewhat buggy dark eyes behind a pair of circular glasses and light brown hair cropped close to his head. A studious Half-blood Ravenclaw classmate of Quirrel's with a much greater interest for Muggle history than the wizarding one, he'd taken over Binns' job as the professor for History of Magic along with the new subject of Comparative History after Binns had finally been forced to retire (to the displeasure of many, exorcism was forbidden by a decree from the Ministry, which meant that the Board and the Council had had to forcibly discontinue his tenure, with some rather typical concessions when it came to eccentric beings of the wizarding world – Binns' classroom still contained a teaching Binns, for those students who got it in their heads to listen to droning lectures on Goblin rebellions), and had, in five years, not only gradually shifted the focus of the class to more world-related events not directly tied to Britain's magical history, but also drastically increased the average O.W.L. grade in the History of Magic, which, in turn, ended up being a great positive mark for the Council of Supervisors.

"I imagine it is not a picnic for the students either, my dear," Heron noted with a smile tugging on the corner of his lips. "After all, they are the ones who have fourteen different subjects and more to get through in five days."

"Twenty-three, in the case of one overachieving fifth-year," Filius corrected. "Alas, he is in Minerva's House."

"That is only because your damned fool of a hat has become too senile to know that one's family does not constitute a viable personal quality," Achilles pointed out. "Percy Weasley should have been in Ravenclaw, and those brothers of his were born Slytherins, if I understand my Houses correctly."

"No one is arguing with you on that point," Minerva assured him. "As much as he is an admirable student, the eldest Mr Weasley currently attending Hogwarts does seem to be an aberration, rather than an example, of the usual type of student sorted into Gryffindor."

"But you are still glad to have gotten him from Filius, aren't you?" Heron asked.

"Of course I am," she confirmed without guile. "He is a credit to his house academically, and if he would only learn to take other people's opinions into consideration more, he would be an exemplary student. As for Fred and George Weasley... I have to admit I would have been relieved, had they actually gone to Horace."

"I imagine that with their distaste for that particular House, it would have been a rather interesting sorting," Achilles noted.

"Well, we've made great strides towards House equality and unity, but this does shows that there is much yet to be done," Heron concluded.

"Yes; like fixing that idiotic hat. Or, better yet, removing it completely."

"You truly dislike it, don't you?" Pomona asked the Sociology professor with a smile.

"The Hat doesn't like him, either," Heron confided in a false whisper. "I believe it began when he'd asked it where he would have been sorted, and the Hat had told him that it didn't sort adults."

"Oh, did it really?" Filius asked. "I'd have rather thought it would refuse to do it because it would be forced to admit that it would have to resort everyone. People really do change from the children they were at eleven."

"To be honest, I don't see the necessity of a House system in the first place," Achilles pointed out, a blasphemy among the Hogwarts-educated. "It only serves very nicely to create the sense of 'us versus them', and that is a prime mentality for conflict. A boarding school such as Hogwarts, which educates all of wizarding Britain and beyond, should be built on unity, not division."

"Actually, I believe that the concept of Houses came about to ease the learning experience," Heron replied. "Grouping students of similar mentalities seems very productive in the case of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws; the first help each other become better and study more easily in an interactive environment, while the second give each other the peace in which to study by themselves, as is their preference."

"And what of the other two Houses?" Albus asked, eyes twinkling in mirth.

"That, I believe, and do keep in mind that this is my conjecture from circumstantial information, was based far more on handling the disobedient. I am speaking, of course, of the original groups, when the Founders themselves were the Heads of Houses. Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin seem to me like people who were much more willing to deal with rambunctious, busybody children than Helga Hufflepuff and Rowena Ravenclaw. And the students from these two houses _do_ share a fair number of traits, not least of which is being more interested in things around them than their own studies."

"An interesting theory," Horace noted.

"The Houses will most likely never be removed," Pomona said, "but the various clubs have worked wonders in bringing down the hostilities between them. I'm fairly certain we've had less detentions assigned for hallway fighting in the last year than we've ever had in any of the previous decade."

"This generation is promising to be a difficult one," Minerva reminded them. "Children of currently influential figures are bound to pick up the animosity between their parents and transfer it to their own interactions."

"So we'll have to be extra vigilant," Filius decided. "Ah, here come the rest."

The last group of faculty entered then: Quirinus Quirrel, the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor, with his somewhat drained visage and the unpleasantly smelling turban, who was involved in a quiet, stuttering conversation on what had changed in the year he'd taken as a sabbatical with the Astronomy professor, Aurora Sinistra, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, with hair held back tightly enough to bruise; behind them followed Bathsheda Babbling, who taught the Studies of Ancient Runes as well as Magical Theory, lightly hunched and near-blind behind her thick glasses, a consequence of her unending interest in these two obscure fields that had prompted her to spend more than one sleepless night over a book with only a candle to allow reading, and Septima Vector, the professor of Arithmancy and Mathematics classes, whose amiable nature was often hidden by her shy demeanour. They greeted the room's occupants and took the remaining seats.

Only when their evening beverages appeared before them did Headmaster Albus Dumbledore stand up and the room fall silent.

"First, let me welcome you all to a new school year," he began, giving then a congenial smile. "The testing week has begun, and I know how harried it makes all of us feel, so I hope that we can keep this meeting relatively short. I am greatly disappointed to have to officially inform you that there will be no room in the current year's budget for adjunct professorships. Some solace, I hope, is the knowledge that this year's group of students is a small one. This will not be the case as of next year, and I assure you that I am working with the Board and the Council on resolving this issue by the next school year. Minerva, if you would."

The Transfigurations professor stood up once the Headmaster had taken his seat. As the Deputy Headmistress, Minerva was the one to primarily concern herself with the class schedules, which she had in a neat stack in front of her.

"The schedules are mostly done, though I still have to adjust for any students who are to be transferred between regular and advanced classes, so please notify me as soon as you've identified them. With the addition of Italian as a class, there will need to be some changes made that I cannot put into effect until I've gotten a complete roster of the students taking the class. Also, there is a change made to N.E.W.T. level Ancient Runes and Magical Theory; for those not aware, the Council and the Board have agreed with Bathsheda's proposition on joining these two classes into one."

What followed was a typical beginning-of-year meeting, covering topics such as the reshuffling of N.E.W.T. classes to help with streamlining the curriculum, a necessity with the drastically increased number of subjects taught; the suggestion of a more interactive, intra-cooperative and perhaps even interdisciplinary curriculum for the upper-years that could broaden the students' spectrum of interest and work in conjunction with the opening of new post-Hogwarts educational platforms and career opportunities; the awareness of the rivalry among the newly-arrived first-years, considering the prominence of their families in the still-shifting political climate; the activities of various clubs and the plans for that year's excursions; and, of course, the main topic of today's meeting – the beginning-of-year testing.

The tests that were being conducted this week had been instituted about six years ago, after it had become apparent that most students didn't keep up with their studies over the summer holidays, which had proven to be a problem with the division of each class into average and advanced. To avoid misplacing students and having to shift their schedules around later on because of it, the Hogwarts faculty had agreed that it would be better to give each class standardised tests that covered the material of their previous years. Based on these results, the students were then sorted into advanced and average groups, with the second advantage of the tests being that each professor had an idea of where each of their students was lacking, and could plan their syllabus accordingly. The system was strenuous for both the faculty and the student body, but had shown, in even just this short of time, that it was a good system, not least because it forced not only students to show themselves in the best light in those subjects they were good at, but also the professors to know which students required their attention and in what way. It was earning Hogwarts back its reputation as the premier magical school in Europe, and though many were apt to complain, there was no true talk of changing it.

As was the usual case, once all the planned meeting points had been achieved, the topic of conversation shifted to more general observations and complaints.

"Other than our discomfort with what's on the third floor?" Heron asked to Albus' question of whether there was anything else that needed to be mentioned before the meeting was deemed completed.

"The students have been warned, and there are other security measures in place to prevent curious ones from gaining access to the floor," the Headmaster assured the room. "The staircases will not connect to the wing on that floor unless for a professor, and alternate routes have been altered accordingly. You all know already that Filius has had to relocate up a floor for this."

"We still don't like it, Albus," Georg stated, pursing his lips lightly. "It's a live Cerberus."

"I truly regret that this is necessary," the old wizard answered with an incline of his head. "You have my assurances that the Cerberus will be removed post haste."

"Well, that means it'll be around until next year," Kyla commented coolly.

"Must you always be contradict?" Elena asked, gently but clearly (which was her way of snapping at Kyla), to which the younger woman raised her carefully shaped eyebrow.

"I am stating the obvious. Why should that disturb you?"

"I trust the Headmaster when he says it will be done as soon as possible," Aurora Sinistra, the Astronomy professor, cut in. The implied ' _don't you?_ ' was tactfully unsaid, though not unheard.

"That is your prerogative," Kyla allowed. "I, unfortunately, have become a sceptic quite a few years ago, and cannot share your utmost trust."

"That is perfectly all right," Albus interrupted. "As the situation stands, the Cerberus is currently a necessary precaution and will stay in place until such a time as it is no longer required, which I will endeavour to accomplish at the soonest opportunity."

"Then I think we're done here," Minerva said, eyes moving over all the faces. "Good evening, and I will see you all tomorrow."

With that, the room's occupants felt themselves dismissed enough to relax and once again fall into various conversations, grateful that they at least had this one free evening before the 1991/92 Hogwarts school-year started in earnest.

* * *

Standing by the largest window of his tower, Fawkes gently rubbing his head against what skin he could find, Albus Dumbledore found himself, as had become alarmingly usual in the past decade, ruminating on who he was and what he had done in his life.

It was an activity that he could now admit to himself he'd always shied away from. History was painful; the thought of his father, dying in Azkaban; of his poor, poor darling Ariana, for whom he'd never had the time; the thought of Aberforth and the decades-old hatred in his eyes; of Gellert and his seductive words and smiles; the thought of Tom and the mistakes he'd made right from the start; of all those who'd died senseless deaths that could have been prevented.

Prevented, if only he'd not been so steeped in his own self-importance, steeped in such blindness that it had taken a group of twenty-year-old children and such base disrespect as he'd never encountered in his life to see what he'd become.

Because, truly, there was no escape from the thought that, though their paths had differed, he and Gellert had ended up doing exactly that which they'd believed in as impressionable youngsters. For the greater good, indeed. He'd thought that by choosing Hogwarts and a humble teaching career, he'd managed to escape his own thirst for power. How unwilling to face his own deepest failings must he have been throughout his hundred years of existence, that he had not only managed to become the most powerful wizard in Britain, perhaps Europe or even wider, but had found ways of using that power for his own benefit whilst justifying – and even believing, for a long while – that he was only doing the most necessary of things for the salvation of his world.

Now, at hundred and ten years of age, Albus Dumbledore felt little use for all that power he'd gained, not when standing in the face of clear proof that his deeds had done nothing but hurt this world he loved dearly, proof contained within these very walls, walls that had been his house and his home for longer than most were alive.

It was infuriating, simply infuriating, to think that inexperienced children such as Lily Snape and Regulus Black had, in less than ten years, so boldly improved Albus' home where Albus himself had weakened its foundations and hadn't even seen it.

And yet, he felt tired of the fury, tired of anger and resentment that had been ensconced in his heart for decades. He felt old, weary, and even – though that was so very hard to admit – humbled by the young, shamed by the strong, the truly strong.

Because strength, Albus Dumbledore had finally learned after a hundred years of egotistical worldview, came not from power, but from self-understanding. True strength, the kind of strength that had allowed James and Mary Potter to give their lives freely and without hesitation so that their baby boy could live. The kind of strength that had allowed Severus Snape and Regulus Black to defy one of the most powerful wizards of their years and yet stand in the madman's midst closely enough to be tainted by the evil if it meant saving everyone else. The kind of strength that had allowed Lily Evans and Remus Lupin to demand change in the face of adversity, to demand a better world than the one they'd all been born into. The kind of strength that had taken for Slytherins and Gryffindors to stand together, united in the face of a common purpose, in this very office, and tell an old egomaniacal fool that enough was enough.

The kind of strength that had taken these two groups to realise that the Houses were not built to promote adversity and hatred, but to bring like-minded people together, so that the whole of wizarding Britain could benefit.

The kind of strength it had taken to accept that a man they'd almost all but worshipped was, in fact, just another power-hungry despot who'd chosen a school to hold court in, a man who'd cloaked himself in a facsimile of benevolence, while nonetheless spreading his own brand of bigotry on the young.

It was something that Albus Dumbledore could face, now. Were it not for all these young people pointing out the flaws in his approach to the position of the Headmaster for the past fifteen years, the Hogwarts of today would have been the same one that his protégé's had been, a place that had almost pushed the boy Severus Snape had been to the dark side, straight into the clutches of a megalomaniacal psychopath. That _had_ pushed so many others towards it in a search for the escape from injustice. Regulus Black and Kyla Slora had come back, but how many others had been permanently lost?

He thought back to that windy, snow-swept night, thought back to the blue-eyed babe held tightly in a red-haired woman's embrace as if it was her own son, and not an orphan, the last orphan of the War.

 _He's not an orphan, you blind old fool! You would make him an orphan with your self-serving schemes, and if we let you, then it will be on all our consciousness, not just yours, if his life turns to ashes beneath him! You would ruin an innocent child for the servitude to some self-fulfilling words and the belief that you know best! Are you that cold-hearted, Albus Dumbledore, that you would walk over the very sacrifice his parents have made, that you would walk over their graves and not once look down, because you need yet another sycophant to worship you?_

 _Ah, but the greatest sycophant of all, Lily. There is a great deal of difference between us normal sycophants, and the Chosen One._

 _I will sooner join Voldemort than let that happen, Albus, and so would everyone else in this room._

 _And what would you have me do?_

Dumbledore sighed, shook his head. The words wouldn't leave him to his peace, just like they'd not done in the ten years since. Wise didn't mean intelligent, nor did experienced mean right. He'd forgotten that in his reluctance and his complacency. Wise allowed others to choose; intelligent would have known that the choice was inevitable from the start, and that this choice would result in hundreds of deaths. Experienced knew how ignorance and hatred poisoned the hearts; right would have stood against it, not considered it an inevitable part of life. In this, he had failed.

 _Their deaths are on your hands, Albus. If you had warned them – us – on time, if you had found the spy instead of procrastinating, they would still be alive._

 _And don't say that the Dark Lord would still be here, too. Prophecies only hold what power we give them; you should know this, Headmaster. There are hundreds of wizarding children born at the end of July in this world, and thousands of ways in which to defy him. Only an utter idiot would rely on a prophecy to get something accomplished, or have you forgotten that only our actions fulfil prophecies?_

 _You do realise that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, don't you, Regulus?_ The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal. _Well, he would have hardly created the circumstance to mark anyone as his equal in his pursuit of destroying the one supposedly coming to destroy him, if he hadn't actually known of it in the first place. The only thing necessary to prevent the prophecy from ever happening would have been to make sure no one had overheard it. But then, of course, the prophecy would never have even existed, because it could never have come true, had he not known of it._

 _Which, what, Frank, implies inevitability?_

 _Of course not; it only implies that there was a way of it reaching Voldemort. If it had been stopped, then it would have remained just another empty string of words in a room filled with those, at least until years down the line when such a child might be old enough to join the war, and who the hell knows what might have happened in twenty years. As it stands, Headmaster, you've done precisely the opposite in every conceivable way. I assume you believed that the existence of the prophecy was enough to end the war? And what of that poor child in Lily's arms, who's lost both parents because of this belief? Was this truly the only way to defeat him in this war? Especially because the Ministry had managed to break his advance with the giants?_

 _Longbottom is right. There are more ways to skin a cat than grabbing it by the tail and ripping its skin off, Albus. You'd think the greatest wizard of all would know that._

And he remembered thinking that yes, this was exactly right, and placing Harry with people who didn't know anything of this world wasn't the only way to make the boy understand the beauty of their world, nor to make him trust Albus the way these children didn't seem to.

That had been the thought that had brought everything down, the words thought in Albus' mind but voiced in Severus' timbre, when the young man had read it out loud.

 _You are no better than Grindelwald or Riddle, Albus, and I am ashamed to be your protégé._

Then, he'd been astounded that Severus had managed to Legilimise him so easily. Now, ten years after the fact, he suspected that he'd simply become overconfident in this in the same way he'd become overconfident in every other aspect of his own existence. But Severus' words, and the emotions behind them, had stung him to his quick, and had, in the end, been what had turned everything around.

Albus had taken Severus under his wing, not for any pity or guilt he'd felt over that damned prank-turned-attempted-murder, but for the understanding that Severus was, perhaps, Albus' second chance in righting the wrongs he'd made with Tom. Which was an excuse, as he privately well knew after the real possibility of losing Severus had made him truly confront the reasons behind his own actions. No, the true reason for his interest in the young Slytherin had been because he'd seen the potential, had seen that the side which held Severus' allegiance would be the side to win, and had seen that he'd already had two advantages over Tom: one was the fact that Tom hadn't yet been aware of Severus' usefulness; the other was Lily Evans.

A shameful reason, and one that still caused Albus pain when he spoke with Severus, but facing his own darkest parts had become necessary if he wished to keep his relationship with the young wizard, and in the five years of their close association, Albus had, without his knowledge, come to love the boy like a son.

This was the truly shocking thing, in all. Albus had believed he would be getting an acolyte; he'd ended up with one of his greatest opponents, strange as it sounded. Severus Snape had grown to be the voice of Dumbledore's conscience, and the only way that Albus could keep him, no matter the impracticality of his position, was to start listening. And to start listening to his conscience, he'd had to face his own faults.

Albus had never truly wanted children. Oh, he'd always imagined what having a son would be like, but a great part of him was very content to keep those just as imaginings, quite aside from the complications of his sexuality in leading towards such an outcome. Perhaps he'd always known, on an unconscious level, that he would be a bad parent, the type of parent who turned his children into his own worshippers, who never allowed them to spread their wings and stand on their own feet, to possess worldviews and opinions separate from his own. That part of him that yearned for this sort of connection was not to be indulged, because it was a fool's wish, this wish to place any being in that sort of position, and so it had always been something best left unfulfilled. No, Albus Dumbledore would have turned his children into his own worshippers, the way he'd turned half of wizarding Britain into his own worshippers, and no matter how much enjoyment there was in the fact that people listened to him nigh-on blindly, this knowledge, that he could do that to his own flesh and blood, had been devastating once he'd forced himself to see it clearly.

And yet, he'd somehow ended up with a son (or, more precisely, with a young man he felt for as a father would for a son), and a son who had become what all good parents wished their children to become – his own man. Severus' fear of Dumbledore had no doubt served well enough to prevent the sort of blind faith Albus inspired until the boy had become a man whose thoughts were independent of his mentor's, until he possessed the clarity to play the devil's advocate to an old, powerful wizard who'd become blinded by his own power in spite of his own efforts of preventing it.

 _You are no better than Grindelwald or Riddle, Albus, and I am ashamed to be your protégé._

Those had been the words that had shown him, from one heartbeat to the next, how much he'd held to lose if he hadn't – and didn't continue to – at least consider their words. So he had seated himself down, sighed heavily, and forced himself to accept, without objection, every last complaint they had had of him. He had looked Severus in the eyes and opened his mind fully, for the first time in his existence, submitted himself to that rag-tag group of Slytherins and Gryffindors, because he had known, in the very deepest depths of his soul, that any other course of action would lead to his own ruin.

Even then, he'd felt so very old, and so very pained, and the thought of losing the connections he had with these youngsters, the core of the Order (or what had remained of the order after five years of true war), the hope for the future, that thought was unbearable in a way that made being Legilimised almost nothing by comparison.

 _You are reluctant to act until it becomes too late. Why is that, Albus?_

 _Because he feels that the power he possesses can corrupt him, so it is more acceptable to let the world burn than face his own personal Abyss._

 _You never even warned the Potters about the attack, did you? Nor the Longbottoms. My best friend. My brother, Albus. And now you would take their son from me, as if there is anything in the world that gives you that right. Why? Why would you ever do such a thing?_

 _Because the Dark Lord is not gone, and if the Boy Who Lived grows up understanding he has a choice in the matter,_ as he has _, then he might not choose as Albus would want._

 _Ironic, isn't it, Severus, that he was willing enough to give the matter of choice to those who aren't really important, but to those who are most important, from them he takes away that right before they even know they have it? And he always taught us that choices are what define a person._

 _What choices a person_ can _make, I should say, Regulus. It's easy to claim a person evil when the choice between right and wrong is clear. It is much harder to do so when the choice is between two wrongs._

 _Why did you not realise that Peter was the traitor?_

 _Yes, Lupin, good question. I do want to know that too, Headmaster. You are one of the greatest Legilimens in the world. Why did you not know it was Pettigrew until it was too late?_

 _Because Legilimising his own people is a disrespectful abuse of power and trust._

 _In a war._

 _Seriously?_

 _Apparently._

 _In a war._

 _Yes, Black, we get it, you enjoy the deadpanning._

 _Just felt that this bears repeating twice._

 _I just have to say that I'm shocked we actually won the war if our leader would rather preserve the modesty of his own people than actually root out a traitorous spy._

 _Do remember, Reg, that half of the Order is dead. The Boneses, the McKinnons, and you know Dorcas only survived because, as much as this pains me to admit, Snivellus here actually managed to knock her out of the way of the Killing Curse, even if it_ was _into another dark one._

 _Reiph._

 _The Lovel sisters._

 _Gideon and Fabian Prewett. I don't think Molly will ever really recover from that._

 _Benjy too. Should we go on?_

And they had gone on, for what had felt like hours, had beaten on Albus' heart and mind with deadly, precise observations and comments, until they'd deconstructed each and every move he'd made in the war that they knew of. Then they'd moved on to his years as the Headmaster, and he'd been so horribly ashamed and guilty when every single person in the room – Lily and Severus, Alice and Frank, Regulus and Sirius and Remus, (aside from little Harry, a silencing charm protecting his sleep) – had given instances of his blatant favouritism of Gryffindors over every other house, the bullying of Slytherins, the complete disregard of Hufflepuffs, the mockery of Ravenclaws. And beyond that, to the damage he'd done to his Gryffindors, as well, by treating them so – Sirius, who'd ostensibly benefited the most in this group from Dumbledore's unconsciously preferential treatment, had said that it had allowed McGonagall to miss the truly horrifying home life he'd been forced to live through for sixteen years, and instead let him vent his own frustrations with it on a quarter of the student body who mostly had not earned his actions. The abuse, Regulus had been firm to remind Albus, was never on only child in the family – even if it was only inflicted on one, it was felt by all – and he himself had been the proof of that, having suffered almost as much as his elder brother, if in drastically different ways.

 _What would you have me do?_

 _Well, for starters, we'd have you actually accept that you're not the infallible wizard you purport yourself to be, and start thinking of ways to fix everything you've done. And that requires you to actually not turn a deaf ear to everything we keep telling you, and to stop keeping secrets from us. The Order is becoming a democratic institution as of tonight._

 _Aside from that, I – we – want your support in the coming years._

 _With what, Lily?_

 _It's time this stagnant, ripened world gets pulled, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the modern age. The United States has started integrating the wizarding world with the Muggle one because of the Cold War, since we all know that Russians don't give two Knuts for the Statute of Secrecy, and they've left us in the dust. For Merlin's sake, they've gone to the Moon seven times over, and I don't think any of our wizards can even conceive the thought, let alone understand all the technology and science behind it, to speak nothing of the discoveries in the field of genetics and medicine and nuclear physics. Voldemort is, at least temporarily, disabled, and our political system is in complete disarray. The time for change is now, and it's only going to happen if you put your weight and influence behind it. Several of my Muggle-born friends and I are starting a union for the rights of Muggle-borns. Voldemort was able to get so many followers only because it's such a hip thing to think that Muggles and people with Muggle heritage are beneath everyone else. Well, no more. He's sullied the idea, and I intend to profit from that, get us on even ground._

 _Bagnold might even go for it; she'll be hard-pressed to hold order in the government if the Death Eaters do what we think they will, which is get revenge for Voldemort's fall._

 _So you will have our very way of life changed._

 _His point is that this is exactly why Voldemort rose to power, because people fear change. And for once, I have to concur with the Headmaster, as much as it pains me to admit it. The Pure-bloods won't let this go quietly._

 _Well, not all Pure-bloods think that way, Regulus. There are plenty of Pure-bloods who believe, at least superficially, in equality. I don't need them to agree with me; I just need them to not oppose me, which they can't, because then they'd be considered as aligning themselves with the remaining Death Eater fraction._

 _Well, you'll have my support, but quietly. I can't back you up until the majority of the populace does, of course, but I'm sure there's at least some in the Dark Lord's circle who can be persuaded not to stand in the way. And, of course, I first have to contend with allegations of being a Death Eater before I can regain any of my late father's political power._

 _I appreciate that, Regulus, thank you. And, to answer your question, Headmaster, yes, I will have our very way of life changed, but not in the way that everyone fears. I will not force my Muggle heritage on anyone, I will simply try to bring innovation to a system that is decaying under its own age. Things like political parties and human equality rights, things that have been accepted as the norm in every other first-world country except for us here since Hitler and Grindelwald._

 _And how will you do this, once you have the power to do it?_

 _Through the basis for any enlightenment – through education._

No one single person would ever know how difficult it was, Dumbledore's fight with himself on letting go of the reigns of the school, just a little bit. Of the reigns of the world, he'd later understood. Not even Minerva McGonagall, his right hand and his closest confidante, would know how deeply he'd been forced to fight his own aspirations and instincts to allow for this wave of change to happen.

Ten years on, Albus Dumbledore was still shocked to realise that things hadn't, as a matter of fact, fallen to ruin, once he'd let them into the hands of others. Hogwarts was thriving, and the new generations that came out of it were not only better prepared to face the big bad world out there, but were hopefully wiser and less indoctrinated than their forefathers had been. And the more things changed, the more it hurt, this evidence that he'd buggered up everything he'd ever set out to do, because he'd not been willing to let others help him or to look critically at his own actions.

There was one thing, though. Given a choice, Albus Dumbledore would have chosen to live through that night again, because, in spite of all the pain he'd had to suffer, all the self-flagellation and regret that he'd had to experience since, the changes were good ones. He'd once thought, after Gellert, that if all the pain of the world were on his shoulders (as it had seemed back then, when he'd had to look down into Gellert's eyes and see the betrayal shining through), he would have carried it willingly, if only the world were a better place. He may have lost that last speck of innocence somewhere along the way, but he remembered it now – they'd made him remember it, made him remember the foolish young professor who'd thought that Tom might change, if only given the chance, rather than the cynical, jaded one that knew in his heart that people didn't change and thus felt the need to give them chances because he'd wanted to believe as he'd once believed; the foolish young professor who'd destined his world to suffering because he'd still been just that naïve – and it was his guiding thought ( _You are no better than Grindelwald or Riddle, Albus, and I am ashamed to be your protégé_ ) whenever he felt that he might falter in his step.

His fireplace flared to life, and, pulling himself out of his own thoughts, Albus turned to greet his visitor.

"Hello, Aberforth."

"Brother," the younger man replied, dusting off his robes and accepting a tumbler of firewhiskey that Albus offered him. "How's the first day gone, then?"

"As usual," Albus answered once the two brothers were seated in the comfortable chairs in his private quarters. "We are straining the capabilities of our staff, the budget is still under review, and the new class numbers quite a few children of Death Eaters as well as Harry Potter."

Aberforth grunted with a shake of his head. "I don't know how you can stand to run this place anymore."

"I have little choice in the matter, so long as Voldemort is still out there."

"That is only an excuse, Albus."

Albus sighed, stifled his first instinct to deny this, and gave his brother's words some thought. "Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I need to stay the Headmaster of Hogwarts until I begin feeling like all the harm I've done is truly on the way to being repaired."

"I am not complaining, Albus, you've been more of a human being in the last ten years than you've been since you left for Hogwarts, but perhaps you are punishing yourself too much."

"I rather believe that I am not punishing myself enough, Aberforth. I have almost a hundred years to atone for, after all."

"That's not what she would have wanted."

Albus lifted his gaze from his glass and looked at the familiar face across from him; Aberforth looked lighter than he could ever remember him being, but that was perhaps only because Albus himself felt heavier than even during the War.

"Unfortunately, I do not know that this is true," he said through the ache in his chest. "I had not wanted to know her when I had the chance, and now I am left with resentment towards myself for depriving myself of it."

"You know, Albus," Aberforth stated lightly, sipping on his drink, "I am impressed by how much you've changed in the past decade, but every time I start wondering if maybe my eyes are only deceiving me, you remind me that your first priority is you yourself. I would have resented myself for not giving her the chance to know me, rather than myself to know her. She adored you, Albus, and she deserved your attention far more than you did hers."

The old headmaster lowered his head in shame of his brother's chastising words.

"I suppose I cannot expect miracles from you, not after all this time. We are both too old for it, and I've found that I have grown tired of this... bitterness towards you that I've carried for a hundred years. Ariana, if she is watching, has probably been very exasperated with me for this. You will never be able to earn her forgiveness, and you will never earn mine, it is far too late for that, but perhaps this turning of the new leaf does have some merit to it. If I had not been so jealous of you, perhaps I would have seen the fallacy in Mother's actions; maybe I could have even convinced you of this before that summer."

This was news to Albus. He'd begun truly trying to rebuild his relationship with his brother after Lily's changes to the school hadn't brought it to ruin, and the road they'd taken to the place they were at now had been thorny and rocky from start to finish. They'd talked little of Ariana and Gellert, only at the very beginning, when Albus had gathered the strength he'd needed to truly admit to Aberforth his own fault of that day, and until now, both brothers had found this to be their preference. They'd both felt that they needed to start on even ground, if they were to even start getting to know one another with fresh eyes, and bringing back the cause of their rift had seemed counterproductive. That Aberforth was the one to come back to this first was, for Albus, a sign that his brother was ready to let the past go, and for him, the old headmaster was glad, because he doubted he'd ever be able to do it himself.

"Of what fallacy are you speaking, Aberforth?"

"Of hiding her from the world, firstly. Trauma and mental illness can be treated. If Mother had been willing to get over her own shame, as she should have, being Ariana's primary caregiver, perhaps the healers could have helped her; if not ours, then some from the continent. Freud's push in Muggle medicine had been more than felt in the Wizarding Austrian Empire, even back then."

"I remember that. I believe Mother had told me that it was safer to move her to Godric's Hollow than report is; that they would have confined her to St. Mungo's. The treatment for mental illness was not what it is today."

Aberforth's eyes were hard when Albus met them. "Whether she was right or not in that opinion, mother was never... gentle with Ariana. She blamed her for what Father had done to those boys, and grew resentful of her for being the weight on Mother's shoulders. Perhaps what she'd told us was the truth; perhaps fear of having Ariana legally confined to St. Mungo's was why she'd kept her hidden. But perhaps, if she'd found a specialist on magical cores, something could have been done to actually help the girl. The only person in our family who ever tried to help Ariana was me. Mother... well, by the end, Mother would have rather seen Ariana disappear forever."

"Do you... Aberforth, are you implying that Mother's death wasn't an accident?"

"I'm implying that I find it very hard to believe that one of the rare times Mother was witness to Ariana's complete loss of control, she died, when I had survived at least two dozen such occasions in eight years."

"Why are you dredging this up?"

"Because I want to point out to you that, no matter how selfish and foolish your actions were, you were not the only one to blame. We were both too young when it happened to do anything about it, but if you are to blame someone, then you can blame Father for choosing revenge over his own family, or Mother for not loving her daughter enough to do what was best for her, regardless of consequence to herself, or you can blame me for never telling you those little cruelties towards Ariana I witnessed, just as you can blame yourself for thinking that we were holding you back. You can even blame Grindelwald for her death, and Doge for not being the true friend that he should have been and telling you when you were in the wrong. The burden of life isn't only yours to carry, Albus, and thinking that it is, is as selfish as thinking that you shouldn't have to carry it at all. You are no martyr; you are just a man who has made terrible mistakes. You will not gain sympathy for taking on the blame that isn't yours to take, this is no way to repair the world."

"I had... I had honestly never thought of this. I will consider it, Aberforth."

"And this is why I have chosen to give you a second change, Brother, because the Albus Dumbledore of the past would never have even let me tell him this, let alone listen to me."

"And I am grateful for that."

Aberforth nodded. "I know that your claim of You-Know-Who is most likely the truth, and the role you will take once he returns. Do not let yourself fall to ruin until then, Albus."

"I will try not to, my dear brother," Albus answered him with a slight smile. "And I hope that you would be willing to remind me of this when it slips my sight."

"That I will, Albus. That I will."


	7. Ch 6: The Rival Houses

**Chapter 6: The Rival Houses**

One's position in the Den of Snakes was an intricate thing, intimately connected with the power that individual wielded within and without the walls of Hogwarts. Boiled down to the bones, that was all there was to the House of Slytherin, Evan found. Power, perceived and imagined, was what made all the rules.

His father had informed him of it a long time ago. Slytherin House was for those with ambition, and ambition always went hand-in-hand with power. Of course, projecting an image of power and actually _having_ that power were two different things, and differentiating between them was what separated the average Snake from those on the top.

Another important thing was the _brand_ of one's power, and the connections between certain Slytherin students formed under this perception were essentially defined by it.

In that regard, Evan's position was strangely undefined. He was a first-year, and by definition, first-years wielded less power than those who'd been there longer. He was a Half-blood, falling into a generally well-represented group in Slytherin, but it still placed him lower than most of his peers – Lily Moon, Tracey Davis and Millicent Bulstrode were this year's Half-bloods along with him, and Millicent bore the name of a Pure-blood family, which immediately lifted her up above him and the other two girls. That didn't mean all that much in the grand scheme of things, but it did make his life slightly more difficult in the immediate environment of the classroom.

What compensated for it was his obvious knowledge in Potions, Herbology and Science, as well as Slughorn's enormous regard for him. Their Head of House loved to play favourites among students irrespective of houses, but his interest in Evan became well-known on the very first night, after Prefect Gemma Fairley had led them down to the Slytherin Quarters. The man had gushed about his father's prowess in Potions and his mother's brilliance, and naturally, that made those who were already in Slug Club look at him with interest.

One thing Evan was determined not to do was try to gain power through acquaintanceships. It was certainly a viable way for those who didn't have anything other, and Evan most certainly did. Plenty of, in fact, not to get tangled up in that web of who's who. Unfortunately, he'd come to Hogwarts in the year that had brought with it obvious future power figures like Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, which naturally meant this resolution would become more and more difficult as time progressed. His biggest preference was to be known in his own house as a knowledgeable loner who swayed with the wind, and so he did all in his power to achieve that goal.

(Of course, when making friends wasn't something one was good at, it was altogether emotionally easier to simply hold tight to the belief that one, in fact, had no wish to make friends in the first place. But this was not something Evan could quite make himself understand at the age of eleven.)

He shared his dorm-room with five other boys. Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle were as dumb as they looked, and their position as Malfoy's bodyguards was uncontested. They stemmed from Slytherin Pure-blood families with known ties to the Dark Lord in the previous war, and as far as their interest went, that was enough for them. Evan didn't think they'd have been able to survive otherwise, anyway. It wasn't that they were mentally challenged or anything, it was that the position they'd naturally taken as Malfoy's goonies seemed to be a sort of permanent position from which they had no aspiration to move, and so they didn't even think to bother reaching whatever potential they might have had.

Theodore Nott, like Evan himself, was a loner. A Pure-blood with a lot of power behind his name, he spoke rarely, but his gaze was always sharp, and he never missed things around him, which made him a veritable well of information. Moreover, he was well aware of this, just like he was aware that his name made him equal to Draco Malfoy in the eyes of others. His position seemed to suit both him and Malfoy perfectly – while one collected followers, the other collected information, and trading between favours was easy for them, because neither one stepped on the shoes of the other. Of all the Slytherin first-years, Evan found him to be, perhaps, the only person he might be willing to consider an ally in the future, should the chips fall favourably in that regard. Not friend, Nott was too calculating for that, but a like-minded individual who already had enough power not to be disturbed by Evan's apparently similar way of gaining it. And as much as he'd never admit to anyone, Evan also appreciated him for being seemingly indifferent to one's blood status. Unlike Zabini, whose favourite brands of insults stemmed from exactly this aspect of the wizarding culture, Nott valued only what was useful to him.

Blaise Zabini was another story entirely. It took him about five days to find out who, exactly, Evan's mother was (as she always went by her maiden name in public circles), after which Evan's self-control was truly put to the test. He wasn't defenceless by any means, of course, and Zabini himself had certain skeletons in his family closet that were easy to dig up (or trade some helpful brewing tips for pieces of information on him Nott had), but the boy still presented a rather big annoyance in Evan's life. The only consolation in the whole thing was that Zabini seemed to dish it out equally to all, including, when the opportunity presented itself, to Draco Malfoy, which meant that Evan wasn't usually his target if there was someone else more attractive within striking distance.

Draco Malfoy, Evan confirmed in that first week, was very vain, and fully relied on his family name and his father's power to gain what he wanted. While he couldn't exactly bully the older Snakes, he could still entice them with his family's connections, which meant he soon had a pretty large backing in the Den of Snakes, even if only by the lower middle element (those in higher years who had already been satisfied with their position in the power structure quickly placed the blonde firstie in his place when it came to flaunting his daddy's name). Zabini tolerated his group of cronies willingly enough, and Malfoy left Nott in peace per their mutual understanding and the fact that the Notts and the Malfoys were on equal standing in their society, but he quickly grew somewhat resentful and condescending of Evan – winning over their Head of House basically on who his parents were apparently made him somehow more likely than Nott to trespass on what Malfoy perceived as his power domain, and in addition, unlike Nott, Evan had a tendency to flaunt his knowledge in those subjects where he excelled – and in most non-casting subjects, he _really_ excelled over the blond first-year. Not that Malfoy was stupid, in fact, he had quite a head on his shoulders, quickly emerging as the top of the class overall, but he didn't hold the specialised focus on narrower branches of magic that Evan did. For his part, Evan felt exactly the same about Malfoy – the boy's self-importance made it impossible for him to appreciate the value of many facets of academic knowledge and the power that could be gained from them, and Evan looked down on him for it, while at the same time carrying some resentment towards the fact that by being very good in all subjects, he was overall academically beating Evan, who was either extremely good or extremely bad at them.

The five girls were a story unto themselves. Pansy Parkinson was the obvious ring-leader, loud, shrill, disdainful of anyone who didn't meet her standards (which was anyone whose last name didn't begin with an _M_ and end with a _Y_ ), and the self-perceived queen of Slytherin first-years. It helped that no one else contested her on it, as she and Daphne Greengrass had known each other for years before, and the other three just didn't have it in them to fight her on it. Millicent Bulstrode was for them what Crabbe and Goyle were for Malfoy, though the girl seemed a little more displeased with her place in the hierarchy than her male counterparts, and Lily Moon, having grown up with a Muggle great-uncle, turned out to be more than a little lost in the complicated, clumsy web of power plays that a bunch of eleven-year-olds were attempting to imitate (because, being honest on the point, they _were_ only eleven years old and their grasp on politics _was_ rather childish), and so stuck to Parkinson's group because she didn't want to be left behind. Tracey Davis was the only girl who wasn't obviously inclined towards them, a studious, mousy girl who was a strange blend between Nott and Evan himself, quiet and uninterested until you annoyed her, in which case you were in for a nasty tongue-lashing. She was the one Evan chose to partner with, and they found a balanced trade of knowledge between them – he helped her with Potions and Science, and she helped him with Charms and Transfiguration.

Nearly all of his classes were with either Hufflepuffs or Ravenclaws, which he found to be a relief. Hufflepuffs were a meek lot who tended to stick to themselves and reacted collectively to insults – that basically meant only Malfoy and Parkinson tended to insult them for the fun of it, and that they were the only ones who got it back in return. Ravenclaws were mentally closer to Slytherins than any other house, and they usually didn't rise to the pitiful challenges of bullies but answered in kind. In complete opposite to Hufflepuffs, they were each to their own, and while that made them easier targets, it didn't make them any less formidable. Both Houses tended to react only when provoked, and provoking them just wasn't all that useful in the long run.

Gryffindors were another matter entirely. The first class Slytherins had with them was Double Potions on Friday, and that turned into a disaster by the end of the first class. Professor Slughorn was a small, fat man who was relatively jolly for a Slytherin, and who clearly enjoyed the class he taught. The Slytherins had met him their first evening after the feast, but they'd not had him in class yet, and the House opinions on the man were too divided to extrapolate any truth behind them. Predictably, those who were in Slug Club spoke highly of him, and those who'd been passed over, mostly average students and those with questionable backgrounds such as children of Death Eaters, said that he loved playing favourites and thought derisively of him for it.

From what Evan had gathered that first night, the man could proudly consider himself a Slytherin – he was certainly familiar enough with the effects of dramatics on a willing audience, and he knew just whom to pull in to gain what he wanted. A collector, just like Evan's father had mentioned. Lily was relatively fond of him, but Severus near enough detested the man. Evan, personally, was leaning towards his father's side of the argument, if for nothing else, then for the fact that he'd singled Evan out just for who his parents were, when he had absolutely no clue whether Evan was any good in the subject the man taught.

"I assume most of you are familiar with the importance of the intricate art of Potion-making," Slughorn began once everyone had quieted down that first Friday. "After all, you've all no doubt been sick in your lives. But it is my experience that many don't fully grasp the opportunities potion-making presents in all areas of wizarding life. That is why I have prepared several potions you will encounter in your five years of mandatory Potions class here at Hogwarts. Not to worry, they are all perfectly safe, and very entertaining as well. Now, then, is there anyone who can identify at least one?"

Several hands rose up – Nott, Tracey and Evan from Slytherin; Sally Smith was the only Gryffindor. Slughorn let them walk by each cauldron on his bench and peer in, smelling the fume and inspecting the colour and consistency. Evan was pretty sure he knew all of them – his father supplied, among others, several smaller joke shops that didn't have their own potioneers on hand. That was, of course, in addition to the frequency with which the Weasley twins commandeered the laboratory for their own little nefarious purposes (the arrangement made everyone involved – Mrs Weasley, the twins, Lily and Evan – excluding Evan's father, of course, quite happy. They were out of Mrs Weasley's hair, helped out around the shop for free, and were allowed some tinkering time for themselves).

When they'd returned to their seats, Slughorn continued.

"Very well. Write your answers on a piece of parchment and hand them over. We will check them at the end of this little demonstration."

No doubt the man intended them to drink the potions. Evan did as he was told, scribbling down the answers and folding the paper so that no one could see. When the four parchment pieces were handed over, Slughorn continued.

"Now, then, is anyone willing to try out the potions?"

Immediately, the male populace of the Gryffindor half (minus Neville Longbottom) raised their hands. Smiling, Slughorn indicated to the four boys that they were to come to the forefront, one for each of the cauldrons. By their whispers, Evan could tell that they were already best pals. Disgusting.

Slughorn stepped first to Harry Potter, his eyes resting lightly on the boy's forehead.

"Oho!" he said when he finally realised whom he had in front of him. To Evan's right, Zabini was rolling his eyes at the theatrics. "Well, Mr Potter! Your father's son, I see, in looks and in personality."

"Yes, sir," the boy replied cheekily.

"Well, then, try it."

Without any further prompting, Potter took a spoonful of the liquid and placed it in his mouth. The effect was almost immediate – his already absolutely unruly hair flew upwards, and Evan thought that if there'd been soot on his face, he'd have looked as if shocked by electricity. The lightning-bolt scar was clearly visible against his skin, and Evan couldn't but inspect it in interest – it was the first time he'd actually seen it first-hand. It stood out, exposed like that, and appeared to be almost fresh, which was absurd considering the fact that it was ten years old. Potter's hand flew to his head, and he grinned when he realised what had happened.

"Hair-Raising Potion," Slughorn declared. "You'll learn how to brew it next year, but I'm sure for those who are willing to spend a little extra time in the library, it wouldn't be a challenge even in a few months." He stepped to the next cauldron, in front of which stood Ronald Weasley. "A Weasley, I see," their professor noted. "Your twin brothers are two of the brightest students I'm currently teaching. Somewhat have a tendency for rule-breaking, but then, what's schooling without some fun, eh?"

"The only bright ones in _that_ family, no doubt," Malfoy commented snidely, making Weasley go red in the face, but he didn't really have any way of retaliating, so he had to suffer it. For his part, Slughorn didn't seem to hear it, or else he pretended not to.

Weasley took the potion, then promptly began to laugh like a lunatic, clenching his stomach and falling to his knees. Soon enough the whole classroom was infected by it, though for different reasons – the Gryffindors laughed with him, the Slytherins laughed at him. Evan joined in heartily; Weasley looked utterly ridiculous, with tears streaming down his red face and trying to gasp for breath.

He finally calmed down some two minutes later, and didn't seem all too pleased by what had happened when he saw the ugly grins on Malfoy's and Zabini's faces. He'd just become the fodder for their weakly quota of insults, and he knew it as well as everyone else in the room did.

"Laugh-inducing Potion, which you will be working on in fourth year," Slughorn explained, appearing mightily pleased with himself. He stepped past Weasley to Dean Thomas, whom he regarded with only enough interest as was necessary of a good professor, not surprising at all, considering there was no prior impression Thomas could have left on him the way Potter did with his 'Boy-Who-Lived' spiel or Weasley, whose five older brothers were Slughorn's students.

Thomas began talking rubbish as soon as he swallowed the allocated potion; then, when he realised what the effect was, he only redoubled his efforts, prompting another round of laughter from Gryffindors and condescending sneers from Slytherins.

"Babbling Beverage will be in the third-year curriculum if there is sufficient time for it," Slughorn explained. "A particular favourite of most fun-lovers."

He gave the same treatment to Seamus Finnigan as he did to Dean Thomas, and informed them that the Hiccoughing Solution that had caused the Gryffindor to nearly belch each of his hiccoughs loudly was to be found in their fifth-year books. Then he dismissed the four Gryffindors, giving them a point each for bravery (as if that was fair – they were _Gryffindors_ , for Merlin's sake, that was their one defining quality), and took the parchments and papers with the answers written by the four who'd inspected them beforehand.

Sally Smith earned Gryffindor another five points, having positively identified the Babbling Beverage. Evan's guess was that she'd been slipped the thing by some cousin or friend before today. Nott and Tracey both got ten points each for identifying the Hair-Raising Potions and the Babbling Beverage, and Evan had no doubt that was because they'd read ahead through the first half of their five-year textbook.

"Oho!" Slughorn exclaimed once he'd read through Evan's answers, lifting his eyes from the paper and turning to inspect him with obvious calculating pride. "Excellent, excellent, Evan, m'boy! You've got them all right. Twenty points to Slytherin. I expected much from you, Evan, your father and mother were both most talented, but I have to say I'm impressed. You even identified the last potion, I truly didn't expect that."

Evan gave him a courteous smile, not missing the appraising look of the whole room and finding it somewhat pleasant. He wasn't about to tell the man the twins had spent about a week in his father's laboratory cooking up all sorts of pranking potions for the coming school-year, including thee of the four on display here today, and that they'd let him participate under promise of absolute secrecy. Damn shame those two weren't in Slytherin, was Evan's opinion – they certainly excelled in those things they saw to their own benefit, and knew how to use them effectively.

Watching the glower on the three slighted Gryffindors, Evan felt nothing but satisfaction. He was well aware of his own abilities in this class, and felt absolutely no compunction about rubbing it into those idiots' noses whenever he had a chance. What was more, he'd just won the same amount of points as the other two Slytherins together, which had instantly lifted his standing in their eyes. Jealous they may have been, but unlike idiotic Gryffindors, Slytherins didn't dwell on that (well, aside from snots like Malfoy and Parkinson), they saw the use they could gain from that kind of person, which was exactly what Evan was banking on. So by the time they started brewing their first potion of the school career, the obvious favourites had already emerged.

The Cure for Boils was one of the simplest things that existed in this particular branch of magic, and Evan had been successful in making it when he was eight years old. Slughorn partnered them in pairs (Evan had already positioned himself beside Tracey, so that was a no-brainer), but due to the fact that there were eleven Slytherins and nine Gryffindors, one pair had to be a mix. That ended up being Zabini and Longbottom. From that point on, the lesson went straight downhill.

Why it was so hard to follow instructions, Evan would never understand. He hated Transfiguration precisely because it required that each person make modulations to the will and foresight they put into their spells, which he sucked at. Potions required precision, concentration and calm. Calm was hard to achieve in a room with twenty students, and he supposed most people his age didn't have the concentration necessary for delicate work – heck, his concentration was non-existent in Defence Class and very shoddy in anything requiring wandwork, so he was perfectly aware that his extreme ease in this class wasn't exactly normal by comparison – but for Merlin's sake, was it so hard to check twice that your cauldron should be _off_ the fire when you added porcupine quills?

Of course, Zabini had no interest in helping Neville, who'd seemed nervous throughout the earlier portion of the class, and whose clumsiness increased in proportion to the rising volume of everyone around them. Crabbe and Goyle had partnered together, which was the case of the blind leading the blind, but at least they didn't make any moves until Malfoy confirmed that was what they were supposed to do – Nott didn't seem to mind that his partner's attention was on the other pair's cauldron, and Evan was secretly thankful for that, because he could just imagine what sort of mishaps would come from those two idiots. Bulstrode turned out to be in the upper half of the class knowledge-wise, and Moon benefited from that by association. Greengrass and Parkinson had no problems with their potion, something expected from Pure-blood children. Of the Gryffindor crowd, the four girls had already seemed to make their own two pairs, with Brown and Petil on one side, and Perks and Smith on the other. Potter and Weasley stuck together, Thomas and Finnigan followed their lead as the two pairs collaborated covertly, so after some time without anything dramatic happening, the four started trading barbs with the Slytherin boys, that then lead to some sneaky attempts at sabotage.

One thing, Evan was certain of. He intended to keep as far away from those two factions as possible in all future classes.

The calm lasted only until Goyle was nearly caught throwing a nettle over the room by Professor Slughorn. He managed to divert his hand in the last moment when Malfoy hissed at him that he was being watched, which resulted in said nettle landing in his own cauldron and spraying Crabbe's uniform. The other boy's startled exclamation made nearly everyone jump in their seat, but the attention was quickly drawn away from the two Slytherins as a loud hissing filled the dungeon, as clouds of green acid began collecting near the ceiling.

Neville had obviously made an error in the wake of the commotion, because Zabini's cauldron was melted into a blob and their potion was creeping over the stone floor to melt the shoes of everyone it came into contact with. The girls shrieked and lifted their feet up, jostling their tables, while the boys jumped onto their seats. While most of the movement passed without incident, Perks' and Smith's cauldron had overturned, spilling the contents all over them.

By the time Slughorn managed to get everything under control – specifically, to vanish the clouds and spilled potions – Neville was moaning in pain as angry red boils sprang up all over his arms, legs and face, Zabini was screaming bloody murder about his ruined cauldron, Crabbe was sporting holes in his clothes, and the two Gryffindor girls were crying over their ruined potion (luckily for them, it was made well enough not to cause damage).

"Oh dear," Slughorn said, pulling Neville to his feet and giving him a thoroughly disappointed look. "Miss Brown, if I could prevail upon you to take him to the hospital wing."

"Yes, of course, Professor," came the girl's response, as she jumped off of her seat and moved to do as she was told, a bit too eagerly.

"And do calm yourself, Mr Zabini, I am certain Mr Longbottom will be glad to compensate you for your destroyed cauldron," the Professor continued, giving the boy a cool look that meant he'd definitely lost some favour in his angry spits and hisses. The boy's complaints tapered off into mutterings about stupid Gryffindors and how Longbottom will regret what he'd done, as if he'd done it on purpose.

When the room was once again in order, Slughorn informed them that they had fifteen minutes until the end of class, and that the two girls whose potion was also spilled would get a chance to make it up after dinner. Malfoy complained to Parkinson how that was unfair, which raised Potter's hackles, and with them the other boys'. Neville may not have been liked within his own house, but he was a Gryffindor, and a good excuse as any to send hate Slytherin way.

By the time everyone was out of the classroom, war between the two houses was all but assured.

And Evan just knew he would be right in the middle of it – Slughorn had asked him to partner with Neville in all future classes, no doubt because the professor preferred to find ways not to deal with clumsy, insecure eleven-year-olds, and Evan's proficiency was a very practical way of accomplishing it. While Evan and Neville had known each other since early childhood – Evan's mum being Neville's godmother and vice versa – there was little love lost between them, as Neville tended to annoy Evan with his insecurities.

So much for being the best, Evan decided grumpily. He should have kept his mouth shut.

* * *

Professor Kleinschuster had been right, and it took only seven days for Hermione to realise how small a difference existed between the magical and the Muggle world, at least when it came to people.

Her first actual encounter with other students in her year ended up being rather disappointing, if not enlightening. When Professor McGonagall had showed up on their doorstep to tell her that she was a witch, Hermione had been in heaven. Not only had it sounded infinitely more interesting than anything she'd ever learned before, but after six years surrounded by people who'd hated her because she loved learning new things, she'd been eager to escape the oppressing environment. She'd known she'd be at a disadvantage – other kids, those who came from wizarding families, already knew so much more than she did. So she'd bought up all the book she'd thought might be useful and she'd sat down and read through them, refusing to admit to herself that she didn't want to be shunned because she didn't know the world she was getting into.

How stupid she was. She'd found herself a place in the compartment with three other girls – the Patil twins and Lavender Brown – and they'd quickly started ignoring her after speaking with her for no more than five minutes. For her part, Hermione had been even a little bit glad – Padma had seemed like someone who might be interested in learning new things, but her sister Parvati and the Brown girl had only talked about clothes and nails and boys and Houses for the whole duration of their stay in the same compartment. By the afternoon, they'd nearly rubbed Hermione's nerves raw, and any possibility that she might talk with Padma about more interesting things had been excluded because the girl had chosen to join her sister in stupid, irrelevant discussions instead. The final nail had been Lavender's disparaging comment about Hermione's hair (which she personally hated, and which she could never get to stay the way she wanted) and her teeth (which she'd cried rivers over once she learned that a little magic could fix what her parents' lifelong work couldn't, if only they'd let her, which they categorically refused).

So, she'd left the compartment to clear her head and stop her tears before they fell, and had gotten nearly knocked over by three boys running down the corridor instead. She'd gone to investigate, glad for any kind of distraction from the day's events and had managed to find a right sight, too – there'd been a cat that had looked just a tad bit too odd to be an actual cat (she'd read all about Kneazles in _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ , and she'd recognised the ears and the tail immediately, even if the tail had been a bit less like a lion's than she'd imagined), a nervous boy holding a toad, and in the compartment, three more boys, one standing straight up by the door, one kneeling by the window, picking up a rat by its tail, and the third sitting curled up in the window seat with a giant book (she'd known the book instantly – _Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_ – as it was one of their allocated reads for Herbology).

The Kneazle had obviously belonged to the boy with the book, as it had climbed up into the boy's lap and sat there surveying the whole scene. Hermione had found the creature fascinating – while she'd seen owls around the station, and an owl regularly brought the _Daily Prophet_ to which she subscribed, the Kneazle was the first actual magical creature she'd run across. It had looked uncannily like a cat, too, because no one else had seemed to realise it wasn't actually one.

The boy had sounded nice enough when the nervous one had thanked him, even if he could have done with washing his hair, but then, Hermione didn't judge such things – she knew how problematic hair could be first-hand. Of course, then she'd forgotten all about the boy and his Kneazle, because the other black-haired boy, the one by the door, had turned out to be Harry Potter, and she'd read all about him. So, she'd decided she'd rather be in this compartment than with those three aggravating girls, and had seated herself down next to Harry.

Of course, at that point in time, she hadn't known just how annoying and hurtful boys could be – she had about as little experience with boys her age as she had with girls.

Ron Weasley and Harry Potter had seemed to really dislike the third boy, whom they called 'Snape', though Hermione hadn't been sure if that was his first or last name. It had sounded familiar, but she'd just not been able to put her finger on it at that point in time. At first, she'd decided to steer the conversation to one familiar ground for all first-years, the Hogwarts Houses. She'd read up on it, and had even talked to some of the prefects about it, too, and she'd come to the conclusion that Gryffindor was the best House. After all, Dumbledore himself was a Gryffindor, as was Professor McGonagall, whom Hermione admired greatly, as she represented a strong, respected female figure in the magical world. She'd thought she might go to Ravenclaw, on account of her love for learning, but the consensus was that Gryffindors were more socially-oriented, and she'd really wanted to have friends for once in her life, actual friends, not just people who agreed to spend time with her in return for her tutoring. It hadn't escaped her notice that all the bad wizards came from Slytherin, nor that Hufflepuff sounded like the castaway House for everyone else. But the boy with the book (Hermione had already been looking forward to not being the only one interested in reading) had seemed like he'd actually _wanted_ to be in Slytherin, which had confused her a bit, seeing how she hadn't thought anyone would want to be a dark wizard. When she'd asked him about it, he'd shot her a hurt look that had had her momentarily reeling back and wondering if she actually had any right to ask about other people's preferences.

Of course, then Ronald Weasley had started talking, and her whole concept of Gryffindor had shifted. He'd called the Snape boy slimy and greasy, which, admittedly, he had seemed to be, but had still been very rude and intended as an insult. He and Harry Potter had been absolutely convinced they'd be Gryffindors, and while she hadn't minded Harry too much – he'd seemed more friendly than Ron in any case – they'd both looked down on the Snape boy because he'd given the impression of someone who wanted to learn, which actually was the primary reason for going to Hogwarts. Since Hermione had counted herself among the 'brainy' bunch, as the boys called it, she'd felt equally insulted when Harry Potter had commented about keeping his distance from people like her and the third boy.

As icing on cake, after that comment, Ron had started whispering rather loudly about how he thought being in the same House as she to be hellish, and how she was a bossy know-it-all whom no one had even invited in. She'd run out of there and hid in the bathroom for the last five minutes of the trip, trying to wipe away angry tears and wondering if that was what awaited her in Gryffindor House.

When she'd put the Hat on, she'd been a bit surprised that the thing hadn't been able decide! It had told her that she had a great amount of courage and bravery in her heart, but that her love for knowledge and learning was equally great. In the end, it had asked her what she really wanted of the sorting.

 _I want to have friends and be accepted for who I am_ , she'd thought in that moment, remembering how Ronald Weasley had called her names because she happened to know a lot of things and wasn't afraid to show it, and how stupid and hurtful Lavender Brown the Gryffindor Girl had seemed. The Hat had given out a soft 'hmm' and then yelled out 'Ravenclaw'. Somehow, Hermione had felt relieved at that.

It hadn't taken her long to understand why the Hat had honoured her request in this way – people in Ravenclaw with her were all a bit... off. Most were about as studious as she was, but a lot of them had strange hobbies, like trying to charm different objects to do unusual things, or studying upside down. There was also the fact that most Ravenclaws preferred to do things by themselves, without anyone else's help. The older students would help if asked, but they never offered assistance, even when they saw someone struggling. Her peers grouped off almost instantly – Terry Boot and Michael Corner started hanging out with Anthony Goldstein, while the other two, Kevin Entwhistle and Stephen Cornfoot, kept to themselves; as for the girls, Padma Petil, who did share her sister's infatuation with her looks to an extent, found likeminded girls in Morag MacDougal and Mandy Brocklehurst. Sue Li became instant friends with second-years Cho Chang and Marietta Edgecombe, Hermione supposed because they already knew each other, and Lisa Turpin kept to her older sister's crowd of fourth-years. That, once again, left Hermione by herself.

She'd tried to make friends with her dormmates the second night, after Professor Kleinschuster had given her his advice on making friends, but the girls had seemed more than a little annoyed with her, and had quickly pointed out that Ravenclaws used their brains, rather than just memorised passages out of books. Hidden among the words, though, had been the fact that Hermione was the only Muggle-born among them, and that they already knew all the stuff she'd had to learn in the past month and would be learning in Wizard Culture. Of the five girls, she'd liked Lisa best, but Lisa seemed to think she was much more intelligent and mature than the rest of them, promptly blowing off all initial attempts to socialise with her peers.

In the end she'd taken to hiding in the library, because in her whole life, books were the one thing that had never rebuffed her advances – they were always there, and they always gave her what she needed or wanted. So she'd chosen to spend her free time reading ahead and learning spells they hadn't covered yet, just to prove to everyone that she was worthy of Rowena Ravenclaw's House.

It was early Saturday morning when she made a friend for the first time. She thought she'd be alone – even Ravenclaws chose to sleep in after the first week of classes – so she'd been quite at ease and completely unprepared for the Slytherin boy from the train. He sat by the window with at least five books open to various pages around him (his Kneazle was currently using one as its perch), and he was (oh, the horror) _writing_ in one of the books. Her astonished gasp made him look up and observe her with curious, if tired eyes.

"Hello," she whispered, remembering that he was nice to that Neville boy and by now pretty desperate for any kind of friendly interaction.

"Hullo," he echoed, still looking at her.

She pulled up the courage she was told she had and moved to sit in the chair beside his. His Kneazle lifted its head and observed her with scrutinising blue eyes, before shifting in its spot on the open book so as to bury its head under its paws; it reminded Hermione absurdly of herself, when light woke her up. The boy returned his eyes to the book in front of him, and Hermione couldn't help but peer from her seat to see what he was actually doing.

The books around him were all on the subjects of Potions, Magical Creatures and Herbology. The book he was furiously scribbling in with a pen was their Potions textbook, and it already looked like it couldn't hold any more writing in it. It was old and yellowed, and the margins were filled with handwriting different from the boy's. He did have a notebook to the side, but it seemed like he'd completely forgotten about it.

"Why are you doing that?" she asked, unable to stifle her curiosity.

"The books are wrong," the boy replied without looking at her, though it was hard to tell where his eyes were when that curtain of hair hid his whole face.

"What?" she asked, aghast. "You must be wrong! They are our _textbooks_ , and we're only first-years anyway! How can you know that they're wrong?"

The boy looked up at that, vibrant green eyes scrutinising her and making her feel as if she were naked. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat and wished she'd taken her own book out, so that she could, too, hide behind her hair and pretend to be reading it.

"You are Muggle-born," he commented, almost idly, and Hermione jumped.

"So what if I am?" she asked stubbornly – she'd already met the prejudices about those without magical heritage.

"So, you can't have ever heard about Potion-making before, and therefore, you can't know if the books are wrong or not."

"And you have?"

"My father is the best Potions Master in Europe."

It was only then that Hermione finally remembered where she'd heard the boy's name.

"Your father is Severus Snape?" she asked, at the same time excited to learn this, and embarrassed not to have remembered before. "I read about him, he perfected the Wolfsbane Potions that was first invented by Damocles Belby, so that it was easier to brew and reduced the pain of transformation. And, he's made several big discoveries about potions affecting the mind and the brain, too."

"Yes, he is my father," the boy confirmed.

"Oh." Of course, it made sense that the boy would know a lot about Potion-making, when his father was one of the best in the field, wouldn't it? But it still didn't make much sense that their books were wrong. "But still, how can the _textbooks_ be wrong? The Ministry of Magic and the Board of Governors have to approve of them, and they wouldn't let us learn things _wrong_!"

"Not wrong, exactly," the boy hedged. "But the curriculum for Potions hasn't been changed since my grandmother was at Hogwarts, you know. Sluggy refuses to change the textbook, and the Board always wants to do everything opposite to the Council, so we're stuck with these probably until Sluggy retires."

"Is that why your book's so scribbled out? Because it belonged to your father?"

"Word of advice, don't go sticking your nose into Slytherin business," the boy said lightly. "We take just as great an offense to that as Gryffindors do."

"Sorry," she apologised, cheeks flaming at the rebuke.

"In this case, I don't mind too much. Yes, this book was my father's, and he did make changes to it when he used it."

"That's cheating," she had to say, scowling. The boy cocked his head to the side, observing her.

"When there are resources that help you further your gain, you don't ask if it's fair to use them, you just do," he said. "But that's why I'm a Slytherin, and you're a Ravenclaw bordering on Gryffindor. You should stop thinking like that; I'm sure there are other Ravenclaws who'd kill to get this book away from me just to be better at the subject. You should also try not to speak down on other people and definitely stop telling them what you think of their every action. No one likes bossy know-it-alls."

Hermione couldn't help visibly wilting at his words, and tears sprung to her eyes. So even he thought she was a bossy know-it-all.

"My mother is also Muggle-born," the boy said and Hermione lifted her head sharply in surprise. "She told me she had some trouble adjusting, too, and she first found out she was a witch when she was nine, so she had a few years of advantage over you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to know as much as you can about our world, but don't be rubbing it into other people's noses that you know more than they do, especially about things they consider themselves to be experts in, and you, the novice. Well," he added after a moment, "unless you actually want them to dislike you. Anyway, how'd you feel if a Pure-blood came to you and started telling you about how the Muggle world works? The tube and doctors with their machines and computers and electronic stuff. Think about that every time you feel like correcting someone like you just did me about my book."

She nearly ran away then, but the boy turned back to his book and his hair fell down to separate them, which gave Hermione that little bit of courage not to do it, but to try and get herself under control instead. When she was sure she wouldn't be crying, she lifted her eyes up to study the boy, for the first time since seeing him here wondering if he was as lonely as she felt.

"I'm sorry," she said, trying to sound as serious and sincere as possible. "I'm Hermione Granger."

The boy looked up and shook her offered hand with a small wry smile.

"Evan Snape, and that's Stheno, my Kneazle."

The feline released a chirping sound at the mention of her name and blinked her blue eyes open; the intelligence in them when she looked at Hermione was obviously superior to that of any regular cat.

"Stheno? Sister to Medusa?"

The smile that spread over the boy's tired face was so radiant Hermione felt taken aback. It really transformed his face, accentuating his cheekbones so that his eyes stood out all the more.

"I can't believe you know that!"

"It's Greek mythology; I mean, I know that Medusa is the most famous Gorgon, but–"

"Not even my parents figured it out until I told them," the boy said, sounding far more engaged and eager than he had just minutes before. "You're the first person I know who's interested in Greek mythology that much."

"Well, the stories are fascinating, aren't they? Why Stheno, though?"

"Cause she's fierce, and Stheno was the fiercest of the Gorgons; her name means 'forceful', you know. She's still only a juvenile, of course, but when she grows to her full size, she'll be magnificent."

"Can I... I mean, would she mind if I petted her?"

Evan shrugged, turning his head slightly towards his familiar. The Kneazle voiced herself on the topic with a bird-sounding sort of meow that Hermione thought sounded curious (and she found it so very fascinating, how an animal could convey her emotions in her voice so clearly). Evan scratched her chin and neck, and she twisted her head so that he was scratching her cheek instead. Hesitantly, because she didn't want to startle either of them, Hermione extended her hand and placed her own fingers on the Kneazle's head. Stheno pulled back from both of them and sniffed Hermione's fingers inquisitively, before settling back in a more comfortable lying position and letting the Ravenclaw continue petting her; Hermione didn't even know she was smiling until her cheeks began hurting.

"So, how are your Potions going?" Evan asked after a moment of quiet.

"All right, I suppose," she answered. "Professor Slughorn explains things nicely, and Hufflepuffs don't create many problems. Although my potion wasn't the best this week, that's what he said, Professor Slughorn. He said someone in the other class did better... he meant you, didn't he?" she asked suspiciously. It hadn't crossed her mind before that, but it had to have been Evan Snape, son of Severus Snape, potioneer extraordinaire. He gave her a slightly smug grin.

"Gryffindor and Hufflepuff are about group effort in class, Ravenclaw and Slytherin are about competition, but, if you want, I don't mind helping out a fellow 'brainiac'."

She laughed softly at that, remembering what Harry Potter had said about 'brains', and accepted Evan's offer even though the idea of doing it chafed with her inborn sense of fairness. The thought of him wanting a favour in return never even crossing her mind, though it really should have. By the time breakfast rolled around, she considered the boy her friend.

* * *

Gryffindor House was pretty much everything Sirius had told him it would be, Harry decided after the first week of classes. While he'd lived his whole life with a fun-loving bachelor who chased evil wizards for a living and spent one night monthly howling at the moon with his best friend, there was still some sort of order in their household – they ate their meals together when they could organise themselves to do so, Harry had a bedtime that was usually broken by about an hour or two, he still had to do all his homework Moony gave him, and if he didn't listen, he did get punished (though the punishments, unless administered by Remus, usually only lasted for a very short time and definitely didn't come close to some of the things his friends had had to suffer). Therefore, sharing a _room_ with four other boys actually was a bit of an adjustment – Ron snored, but then he hadn't minded that all that much during their sleepovers; Dean talked in his sleep, mostly about that Muggle sport he was so obsessed with; Neville shifted _constantly_ ; and Seamus had a nasty habit of sleepwalking when he overstuffed himself at dinner. Even so, Gryffindor. Was. _Awesome_.

Harry didn't pay much mind to the girls. They'd separated into two pairs from what he'd seen, and they talked about boys and clothes and nails and other girly stuff that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand out. The Two Sallys, as the boys had started calling them (though Perks' name was actually Sally-Anne), seemed to be a bit more approachable towards the male populace of their year. Smith was a Pure-blood, and Perks was a Muggle-born, but they worked pretty well together from what Harry could tell, since both seemed interested in the other's world. By contrast, Lavender Brown's and Parvati Petil's interests were oriented inwards, towards things they liked or disliked, and Harry found their talks too vapid to really invest any more thought into them.

Harry had made friends with the other two boys the very same night they were all sorted together. Dean Thomas was an all-around-good-guy from what Harry could tell, and he was wicked good at drawing. He was the only Muggle-born in their dormitory, and he had a propensity to talk about Muggle things, something that Ron found mildly boring, but Harry himself found fascinating. Three days into their friendship, Harry was already asking him to teach them how to play football – Quidditch was unsurpassable, naturally, but as someone who detested staying in one place for too long, Harry had a natural affinity for all sorts of physical activities. Besides, football was challenging in its own way, as they figured out soon enough.

Seamus Finnigan was almost as clumsy as Neville, and Harry suspected he found secret enjoyment in blowing things up. Unlike Dean, he had a rather nasty side when provoked, and Harry was hard pressed to win him over. Perhaps it was because he came from Ireland, which had by and large evaded Voldemort's three active years of terror, but he actually seemed displeased with Harry's fame. It was a somewhat novel experience, as Dean had absolutely no idea who Voldemort even was, and the other two boys had known Harry since they were all very little. At most, his reputation was not something that any of them thought of privately. However, Seamus and Dean had become almost inseparable in the first week, and as Dean naturally came around to Harry's and Ron's little twosome, so did Seamus.

Neville was a different story entirely, and Harry honestly couldn't say _why_ he'd even been sorted into Gryffindor. When he asked the clumsy boy about it, Neville told him, rather distraught, that he'd tried to convince the Hat to put him in Hufflepuff, and that the Hat had staunchly refused. While Harry tried not to exclude Neville too much from their activities, it was inevitable that the quiet boy drifted away from the rowdy bunch, and they didn't see all that much of him. When they did, he was a bundle of nerves, messing up in every class but Herbology and tripping over his own feet. While they all knew he wasn't as high-strung as that in the privacy of their dorm, it was more than enough to make him a prime target of Slytherin bullying.

So, on Friday night, after Neville had gone to shower and left the dorm to the four boys, Harry decided to take initiative.

"We need to make sure those Snakes know not to mess with one of ours," he said once he settled himself onto his bed. Ron lounged on his, Dean was sorting his football trading cards on the floor, and Seamus had been trying to figure out a spell from Harry's _Curses and Counter-Curses_ , but was now giving his attention to Harry. "Neville may be a lost cause as a Gryffindor, but he _is_ a Gryffindor, and we shouldn't let Snakes mess with him. My dad and my godfather would have never allowed it when they were here!"

"You know, Sirius is awesome," Ron agreed, telling it more to the other two boys, who didn't know the man, than Harry, who already knew Ron's position on it. "He and Harry's dad and another boy were in a group called Marauders, and they were brilliant, better than even Fred and George."

"What did they do that was so awesome?" Seamus asked, doubtful.

"They played pranks on everyone, and they snuck around the whole of Hogwarts. Harry's dad was one of the best Gryffindor Chasers ever, and all the girls liked them..."

"Yeah, but did they do something big?"

Harry, who obviously knew they did actually do something big – learning how to turn into an animal was enormous in his opinion – nonetheless knew it was Top Secret and that he couldn't just blurt it out. Not even Ron knew about it, and Sirius would be seriously (ha! that one never got old) angry with him if he slipped up and told him.

"They made a whole map of the school," he offered instead. "And it shows _all_ the secret passages and hidden rooms, and _all_ the people and where they are right at that moment. It even shows ghosts and Peeves. And the best thing is that if you don't know the password, it'll just insult you in your face, so no one will figure out what it is if they don't know already."

"That sounds pretty big," Dean agreed congenially. "Right, Seamus? That'd be very useful."

"So where is it now, the map?"

"Filch took it two days before they graduated, so they couldn't take it back," Harry explained. "But Sirius thinks that the annoying codger still has it."

"You know, we should make a group like that, too," Ron decided with starry eyes. "Figure out cool names for ourselves and everything. Harry, what do Sirius and Mr Lupin call each other again?"

"Sirius is Padfoot and Remus is Moony and Dad was Prongs."

"What kinds of names are _those_?" Seamus asked, looking at Harry with sceptically. In response, Harry shrugged. _He_ knew, of course, but they couldn't.

"Inside joke they wouldn't tell me," he answered instead. "But Sirius always claims they fit if you understand it, so I suppose they aren't all that stupid. To them, anyway. Between us, though, I want a new name. Mine is just _lame_."

"What, you have one too?" Seamus asked with a frown.

"What is it?" Dean continued, sounding much more interested than his best friend.

"Prongslet, but that's because I'm Dad's kid. I've given up trying to persuade him to think of something else, though I'm sure Sirius would just come up with something equally ridiculous if he had a kid himself. Sometimes he's unreasonable like that. Or Moony," he added as an afterthought to the previous sentence, "but I can't really see that happening, like, ever."

"Why not? I mean, sure, Sirius likes girls too much to just pick one," Ron said with a roll of his eyes, "but Mr Lupin really isn't all that old. If he found himself a girlfriend," and here Harry's best friend made a disgusted face, "then he could have kids like your dad did."

"I suppose," Harry had to admit to the logic, scrunching his nose. "But he's kinda... depressing. I mean, he's great, he's the best uncle ever, but he always seems so sad and he never says anything nice about himself. How would anyone love him if he doesn't love himself? I mean, aside from Sirius and me. Well, in any case, if he ever does have kids, then we have a moral obligation to find a better nickname for the kid than Moonling or Moonlet."

The other three boys snorted at the names. "Merlin, that sounds awful," Seamus decided.

"Leaves me thinking of mooning somebody."

Harry guffawed at the thought. "The worst thing is, Ron, I think Sirius would have thought that hilarious enough to actually pick a name like that. I mean, it's not like 'Moony' is that much better either. Remus said the whole thing started when they gave him that nickname, and he hated it, you know. Though I have to admit that they don't suck _all_ the time. You know Snape?" he asked the other two boys.

"That Slytherin with greasy hair, Slughorn's little arse licker?" Seamus asked for confirmation, earning a weary look from Dean for his language that he just ignored.

"Yeah, him. His dad was in school with my dad and Sirius and Remus, always pestering them and sneaking around and stuff. Sirius still calls him 'Snivellus'."

Ron actually laughed this time, and the others tried to keep their grins off their faces, before deciding it a lost cause and joining in.

"Too bad it's already taken, or we could have used it on his kid."

"You know, I don't think it would fit at all," Harry said, somewhat pensively. "I actually think it would fit Malfoy much better. He's the simpering prat of that lot, all sleazy and _oh, my daddy_ _'_ _s the biggest, baddest, and you better suck up my arse or he_ _'_ _ll get you_." His three friends dissolved into fits of laugher at his snooty impersonation. "Snape can actually return the insult, unlike _Malfoy_ , who goes all red and spluttering and _snivelling_ to his daddy when _somefink isn_ _'_ _t like he likes it._ Right, Ron? You saw him on the train."

"Yeah, as much as it pains me to admit it, you're right. It would suit that berk much better."

"So, we come up with something else," Seamus said, shrugging his shoulders.

"Why don't you like the boy anyway?" Dean questioned, something that didn't surprise Harry in the least. He was the type of person who got on with everyone, after all, he'd be the least inclined to dislike someone on sight.

"You mean, aside from being a Slytherin?" Ron asked, raising his eyebrow.

"Yes, aside from that. That's just prejudice, nothing more, and Mum always says that those are stupid and you should never have them."

"I don't like him because he looks down on anyone he thinks is less smart than he is," Harry answered. "He thinks everyone who prefers Quidditch to _learning_ is a moron, and you saw him in Potions today, the way Slughorn simpered about how _brilliant_ he is at Potions and blah blah."

"Like he wasn't the same with you," Seamus noted with disdain.

"Sure, but I won't suck up to Slughorn no matter why he may like me. I bet you a galleon that Snape will be allowed to do his own potions outside of class within a month, and that Slughorn will be so very pleased with it. Slytherins look down on people; they're all the same."

No one argued with that; they'd had only one class with the Slytherins, but they'd all noticed the attitude throughout said class, and Harry was right.

"Well, we can't let them hurt Neville," Dean decided with a nod. "What kind of housemates would we be?"

"Exactly," Harry was quick to agree. "So what we have to do is let everyone know not to mess with us."

"And what do we call ourselves, then?" Seamus asked, cocking his head slightly.

"Well, I was thinking," Harry replied, licking his lips in excitement. "How about Junior Marauders?"


	8. Ch 7: The Challenges of New Environment

**Chapter 7: The Challenges of New Environment**

Evan's first bad day was the first Saturday after arriving at Hogwarts, when the excitement of new classes, new students and general new surroundings wore off enough for him to realise that he _wouldn't be seeing his parents until Christmas._

Evan had begun suffering night terrors at the age of four, around the time his mother lost her second child and had to spend three months at St. Mungo's. Memories of that time were mostly gone, and what wasn't was fuzzy and vague, but what he still remembered clearly was the fear that his mother would never come back, a fear that had persisted well after she'd come back home and even started working again. The night terrors had been a very frequent thing back then, and had begun tapering off only in the last two or three years, but they were by no means gone. However, most likely due to his Occlumency studies, he'd become far more aware of them as he got older, to the point where he even remembered the senseless terror that regularly accompanied them even after he woke up (from what he'd found in the library near his home, even the vast majority of adults who suffered from night terrors didn't actually remember anything preceding them waking up drenched in sweat, with a hammering heart). This made Evan feel that he'd traded their frequency for their intensity, but his mother insisted that they'd not become any worse for being rarer these days – apparently (though he had no real recollection of it), he'd been able to scream non-stop for ten minutes and more during the episodes. He didn't do that as often anymore, but he still did have a tendency to thrash around the bed and even jump out of it as the shadows chased him.

On Saturday evening, the desert ended up being treacle tart, Evan's favourite, and he dug into it with perhaps too much gusto, because he was trying to escape the thought of being away from home and his mum and dad for so very long – four months, he'd _never_ been away from them for more than a day or two and he _wasn't going to think about that_ – and the treacle tart was so tasty even his panic at having to stay at Hogwarts for so long couldn't beat it.

So he stuffed himself silly, which was in hindsight not a very good idea, because by the time he got into his bed and settled in for the night, he'd still not managed to digest it properly, and that left him with an uncomfortable, slightly constipated feeling in his stomach that made it a bit hard to fall asleep.

There were flashes of shadows chasing him and painful touches and muffled voices, and he felt cold and hot at the same time and his heart wanted to beat out of his chest and he couldn't get enough air and–

–and he was sitting in the middle of a stuffy, blurry room that he didn't know and his hair was sticking to his damp forehead and neck and cheeks, and his heartbeat was ringing in his ears, a rapid staccato fluttering in his chest, and his throat was scratchy and dry and he couldn't get enough air, and where was he, how had he gotten there, why was he even–

– _breathe, deep breaths, in, hold, out, in, hold, out, breathe, my little light_ –

–breath in, held, breath out, repeat, repeat, repeat, _go away go away go away go away go away_ –

–Instinctive protective magic took over, reaching for his Occlumency training, and Evan shoved all the feelings and horrid sensations of terror and confusion away from the forefront of his brain, until the dawning realisation ( _oh, Merlin, not a night terror again_ ) bubbled up.

The room he was in was his dormitory, and the towering things around him were their four-poster beds, and the reason the room felt so stuffy and constricting was that it was filled with children – the five boys from his class were huddled on Goyle's bed, looking absolutely terrified, and plenty of older students were crowding the entryway. Worse was that two teenagers were kneeling a little bit away in front of him, with apprehensive, slightly panicked looks on their faces, and Evan recognised both of them as the Slytherin prefects.

He felt a momentary relief that he was good enough at Occlumency basics to have managed to extricate himself from the miasma of pure terror and utter confusion without his father guiding him through it as had been the case when he'd been home, but it flickered out quickly enough under the scrutiny of what felt like half of Slytherin house and the struggle of finding his bearings after being forcibly woken up.

And the physical sensation of clammy skin and damp cotton was absolutely yucky and completely distracting, too.

"Hey," Prefect Terrence Higgs said, "are you with us now?"

"I, erm..." Evan coughed lightly, throat scratchy. "Think so, yeah. Sorry."

"What happened to you?" Nott, clearly the least frightened of the firsties, asked him; he still looked about ready to hide under the bed. "You started thrashing around and kicking on the bed, and then when Prefect Higgs tried to wake you up, you started screaming and you wouldn't stop."

Heat flooded Evan's cheeks, and he felt tears gathering in his eyes. He wanted his mum and dad here, not other kids his age who would only mock him for this. He wanted to be home, in his own room, where it was safe to suffer through this, with the people who knew how to help him, where there were no inquisitive, frightened eyes staring at him as if he was an abomination, where he _knew_ the shadows would never get him, because his dad and mum were there to protect him, always.

A loud rumbling sound was the only warning he got before silkily soft fur found its way under his hands and a warm weight wedged itself between his knees and his chest. Startled out of his thoughts, Evan instinctively wound his arms around Stheno, feeling his breath come back to him when she nosed his face and licked his tears with her raspy cat tongue, purring loudly enough to be heard across the room.

That was right; he didn't have his room and his parents, but he did have his Kneazle, and she gave him at least a little bit of his safety back.

"Move out of the way," a high, assertive voice called out from the hallway, and he took the moment of distraction to wipe at his own cheeks. The girl who walked in was, as everyone else was, dressed in her pyjamas, and her copper hair was braided thickly over one shoulder. She appeared some years older than the firsties, and looked at him with compassion and clear understanding, the only person in the room to be doing so. "Nothing to see 'ere. Come on, move it, move it, move it."

"Sivney, did you get her?" Gemma Farley, the other prefect, asked the girl.

"Yeah; Ma's comin' in a minute. You ok, kid?" She had a distinct, though tempered, Scottish accent, and seemed like she enjoyed swallowing consonants here and there. "Bet ya gave'm a scare."

"I didn't mean to," he muttered, shrinking into himself.

"Meh, no harm," she said, seating herself on the ground between Farley and Higgs. "Mum says they shouldn'ta touched you."

He nodded, rubbing his nose against his forearm. "Makes it worse."

"Will someone tell _us_ what happened?" Malfoy whined, having recovered some of his courage.

"Night terrors," the girl told him, her 'r' sounds ringing in Evan's skull. "He'll be a'right. Jus' scary, 's all."

"How many times have I told you not to sit on the floor?" Professor Slora's voice made them all look up at her. The resemblance between her and the girl was more than passing; they had the same facial features, even if Sivney's colouring was a bit lighter and brighter, and when they spoke, they had the same accented pronunciation, even if the professor's wasn't nearly as obvious. In response to the words, Sivney scrambled up onto her feet, giving the woman – Evan assumed her mother – an unrepentant look. "All right, children, the excitement's over. Back to your dorms."

Slowly, the peanut gallery dispersed, until only the people in the room remained.

"What are night terrors?" Crabbe asked, beady eyes still glued to Evan.

"They are a sleep disorder some people suffer from; it's nothing to be alarmed about."

"He looked like he'd gone crazy," Zabini pointed out.

"As you've found out yourselves, night terrors are not a pleasant thing for either the person experiencing them, or the people forced to watch them, and calling your yearmate crazy in this instance is quite cruel," Slora answered, giving him a hard glare. "The next time this happens, send for me immediately, please, and in the meantime, don't try to engage with him in any way. In most cases, night terrors pass by themselves and Evan probably won't even remember anything in the morning."

"Really?" Nott asked, head whipping around so that he could peer at Evan. "You don't remember anything?"

"Just bits and pieces if I wake up while they're happening," Evan admitted. "If I don't, I usually don't remember them."

"Huh. So how often do they happen?" Malfoy asked, having uncurled himself from his spot until he was kneeling on the edge of the bed. With his blonde hair in complete disarray and in dark blue pyjamas, he looked nothing like the snooty Malfoy; he looked like just another eleven-year-old who'd been woken up in an unpleasant way.

"Dunno."

"An approximation would be useful, Mr Snape," Slora pointed out gently.

"Maybe a few times a year. They just happen," he answered defensively.

"I am aware of that; your father has informed me of it, however, I had not yet had time to discuss this with your dormmates. I apologise for this."

"'S not your fault," he said, wiping his eyes discretely.

"Then I suppose now is a good a time as any to do it. Do get comfortable, gentlemen and ladies, nothing is going to happen."

Somewhat embarrassed, the other kids migrated to their beds, wide awake now. Sivney tugged on Evan's arm until he uncurled himself and allowed the older girl to drag him to his own bed, which, he could now see, was in complete disarray, the sheets almost fully spilling onto the floor. Stheno followed him, curling right back up in his lap as soon as he'd sat himself, even as the older girl cast a quick drying spell that made Evan fell at least a little bit better. Professor Slora conjured a chair for herself and waited until even the two prefects had taken their seat on Crabbe's and Goyle's chests, before tucking the wand into the folds of her night robes and giving all the children a stern look.

"Now, as you may have inferred, this is something that Evan has no control over and that will most likely happen again at some point in the future. It is important that you do not touch him or try to wake him up. I will put a charm up to alert me in case this should happen again, and I will also make sure that, in case you do begin screaming again, you do not wake the other years up."

"Mum has a charm for that already," Evan said quietly. "I'm sure she would give it to you if you asked her."

"Then I will do so. I do understand that it is frightening for the rest of you as it is for Mr Snape, but you will have to be accommodating towards your classmate in this regard. Medical conditions are nothing to be ashamed of. You are a unit, and in this regard, you will stand as one. I want no hazing on this point; your internal structures are your business, but on this I am putting my foot down. The first person to attempt using this against Mr Snape will be severely punished, by me."

"I'll make sure I doesn't happen," Sivney vowed loudly, which seemed quite enough for Professor Slora.

"Now, the prefects. Inform the others of what has happened, and make sure they understand that they are not to use magic on Mr Snape to forcibly calm him. Most children grow out of night terrors by their late teens, but the current belief is that they persist longer in children who've been magically treated for them."

"So, does that mean this isn't a magical illness?" Higgs asked.

"That is correct; this is something that affects the human populace irrespective of their magical status and that cannot be easily treated by magical means, very much like viral and chronic diseases. Let it pass, make sure that others are minimally disturbed, and otherwise do not fret. Now, if that is cleared up, to bed with all of you. Mr Snape, come with me, please."

Though he knew they wouldn't be going back to sleep in any case, Evan still watched the rest of his classmates settle into their beds as he pulled on a jumper and slippers, and followed Sivney and Professor Slora to the common room. The girl gave him a hard pat on the back and waved at her mother, before disappearing down the hall that led to the girls' dorms.

"Come along, Evan."

Startled by the use of his first name, Evan looked up at the professor as she led them out of the common room and through the hallway to a nondescript column. She tapped her wand against it twice, and the stone wall opened in much the same way the one to their common room did. She ushered him into what he figured were her private quarters. The fire was already blazing in the fireplace, and there were two comfortable-looking high chairs positioned in front of it. Bookshelves lined the other three walls, with spaces only for doors leading to other rooms on each of them. The room was done in reds and greens, dark and cool, giving the place a roomy, comfortable feel.

"Now, then, since I assume you won't be able to go back to sleep soon, I thought you might wish to stay here for a while, until the others nod off."

"Thank you, Professor," he said honestly, taking a seat in one of the chairs. "How did you know what was going on?"

"Sivney's father had night terrors; my second cousin," she clarified. "I had never witnessed them, of course, but I did hear my mother and his speaking of this once, when I was very young. Sivney herself had intense nightmares when she was a young child, so I am familiar with the process."

"I read that night terrors can be inherited," he admitted, his curiosity getting the better of him as he looked with interest around the room. "But my parents said no one in my family had them before me."

"I believe that is correct. Mr Snape," she called until Evan turned and blinked at her. "Tell me if they give you any trouble over this."

"Oh, I'm sure they will, when they stop being afraid of it," he said ruefully, shrugging his shoulders. "I had hoped that it wouldn't be this big a deal. I don't usually scream anymore, you see, only when something frightens me during the episode."

"As they did. Even so. Boys will be boys, especially Slytherin ones, I'm aware, but that is no reason to let it pass unchecked. At the very least, tell my daughter; she is certainly effective at placing others in their places."

Evan was about to ask her what year Sivney was when the fireplace roared to life and a person emerged from the green flames. It took only seconds before Evan had launched himself at the woman, heart beating wildly in his chest as tears started gathering in his eyes.

"Mummy."

"Hello, darling," Lily Snape said, kneeling so that Evan could properly wrap his arms around her. "I hear you've had a rough night."

"It happened again."

With a soft murmur, Lily lifted him into her arms, letting him wrap his legs around her like a limpet, and settled them both into the chair he'd vacated. He clung to her for a long time, crying quietly as all the residual fear and mortification of the night drained away through the tears. In the sudden order that Professor Slora had brought to the room, he'd been momentarily distracted from his own feelings. His mother's embrace was the one of the two places where he felt truly safe, safe enough to show emotions even if the stern professor was watching.

"I apologise for not getting in front of this situation, Mrs Snape," Slora said with a note of professional distance.

"Lily, please, and this is no fault of yours. Did you get upset about something, honey?"

"No, I... I ate too much treacle tart," he admitted sheepishly, moving to wipe his cheeks with his sleeves. His mother conjured a handkerchief with a flick of her wrist and offered it to him, the little bit of wandless magic making him absurdly proud of her.

"That should do it. Thank you for calling me, Professor Slora."

"Kyla is acceptable. Severus did not mention this, but I had a feeling when I last spoke with him that he would prefer to be informed if it happened."

"How do you know my dad, Professor?" Evan asked, surprised that she'd use Severus' first name with such ease.

"I was in my seventh year when he and your mother were in their first," Slora told him. "Severus was of interest to Lucius Malfoy, therefore he came under my purview."

"Oh," Evan voiced, remembering Draco's father and his cold, condescending stare. "Thank you for calling my mum, Professor."

"You are welcome, Evan."

Though he'd thought he'd not be able to fall back asleep, he ended up dozing with his cheek nestled against his mother's collarbone, legs tucked up close to his chest, and her arms wrapped comfortingly around him. He had no idea how much time passed, his mother's and his professor's voices indistinct murmurs around him, but at some point, his mother shifted enough to drag him back to wakefulness, and he stirred enough to look up balefully at her.

"Do you think you can go back to sleep?" Lily asked, tucking his greasy hair behind his ear. He nodded, though he was pretty certain he wouldn't be sleeping any more tonight, not if he wasn't sleeping in his parents' bed.

His mum cast a Feather-light Charm on him and stood up, settling him close against her chest as Professor Slora opened the door to the Slytherin common room. Evan, though he didn't want to look even more like a cry-baby in front of one of his professors, still felt far too rattled to give up being carried in his mother's arms for just one night, and willingly accepted the humiliation.

Thankfully, when his mum brought him into his dorm, the other boys were asleep. Evan slithered into his now neatly set sheets, dislodging Stheno from his pillow as he settled in. His mum waited him out before smoothing his hair back and leaning over to kiss him on the temple, and it wasn't what he'd really wanted, but it was close enough that Evan relaxed and closed his eyes, feeling just a little convinced that he'd be able to sleep now.

As soon as his mum and Professor Slora were gone, though, there was deliberate shuffling from the next bed over that made Evan almost shoot out of his own bed. He'd been wrong that all the other boys had been sleeping – Theodore Nott was clearly still awake, and was now propping himself up on his elbows to look Evan over.

"You ok, mate?" Nott asked softly.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"I don't think you are."

"So what if I'm not?" he asked the other boy defensively.

"Look, I won't try to use this against you or anything. You just really scared me tonight."

"Sorry," Evan muttered, turning on his side to properly look at the other boy, Stheno stretching herself against his chest. Theo Nott was pale and reedy, with sandy-brown hair that flopped into his eyes if he ran his hand through it too much. "Do you ever wish that we were like other houses?"

"What, you mean between ourselves?"

"Yeah. I bet no one would ever say anything if this happened to Potterprat. I bet he doesn't have to worry about his dorm mates using anything like this against him."

"Maybe; maybe that's just because he's Saint Potter," Nott answered with a light shrug. "And anyway, I don't think all Slytherins are like this at all. It's just that our class is like this because of Malfoy and Zabini. And Parkinson and Greengrass, but who's counting girls, right?"

"What, so you think we'd be mates, actual mates, if it wasn't for those guys?" Evan asked him, startled slightly by the insinuation.

"We can be mates anyway if you want; not the kind that spends all their time together, mind," Nott added, "but I suppose two loners can hang out from time to time and trust the other not to stab them in the back."

"I suppose so," Evan agreed, pulling himself up to extend his hand to the other boy. Nott gave him a smirk and tip-toed to Evan's bed. After he'd climbed up and drawn the curtain around them, he accepted Evan's hand.

"Theo's for friends."

"Oh, we're friends now?" Evan asked with a light smile. "I thought we were just two lone wolves passing the time together."

Theo lifted his eyebrow in a sarcastic answer. "Didn't know you had a sense of humour, Snape."

"Evan's for comrades," he echoed the other boy's words. "I think that's a better description."

"I agree. As for the Slytherin House, the prefects and Sivney Slora will all, I think, prove to be more alike to other teenagers than our class has shown to be."

"Davis is not too bad," Evan commented. "She's the only one who doesn't pretend to be fifty years old whenever she can."

"At least she's smarter than the rest of them," Theo agreed. "That's just our rotten luck, being in the same class as those guys, is all."

"How come you don't like them? Isn't your father friends with their parents?"

Theo's face twisted into a grimace. "Sure he is; they were all chummy-hummy during the War, but then your father was, as well."

"Doesn't mean he fought for the other side," Evan pointed out, somewhat defensively.

"Doesn't mean mine did, either. He wants me to be on good terms with Malfoy and the entourage, I can do that; doesn't mean I want to hang off their every word, or be groomed to become whatever my parents want me to become, like they do."

"I hear you."

"Do you? Because it seems like you're quite willing to emulate _your_ father."

"Because I like potions? That has nothing to do with it," Evan argued. "If I were better at charms, I'd probably be like my mum. It's just that potion-making comes naturally to me, and so I've spent more time with him than with Mum in studying."

"If you say so."

"We'll see in a few years, won't we," he answered rhetorically.

"What do I do when this happens again?" Theo asked him, cocking his head to the side.

"Well, it'd be nice if you made sure that I didn't wake the others up. We should look up some silencing spells in the library tomorrow."

"Very well," the other boy said, closing his eyes to yawn widely and making Evan yawn in answer. "I'm off to bed now. I'll meet you in the library tomorrow after breakfast."

"Sure thing," Evan agreed.

* * *

"I expected Severus tonight," Kyla Slora said once Evan had clearly nodded off in Lily's arms and Lily had explained the charm she used to keep Evan from disturbing the neighbours. The eleven-year-old's mother studied the older woman with slight disquiet, not fully certain what she thought of her yet. When Evan's Latin professor had woken them up to tell them of Evan's night terror, Sev had intended to join her at once. Lily had convinced him to allow Professor Slora to handle it, not only because she believed that Evan had to begin dealing with them in an environment where he wouldn't have his parents instantly near, but also because she herself had wanted to see him later on.

The Slytherin before her had been part of Lucius Malfoy's gang, or, at least, the female group who'd hung out with Malfoy's gang. Lily remembered her only vaguely; she'd not had much interest in seventh-years when she was a first-year, and she'd largely not noticed Malfoy's interest in Severus. Realistically, she knew that Sev had kept up with his former housemates, but he only rarely mentioned Slora in any way not tied to current Hogwarts dealings.

Lily's first impression was of someone inherently closed, in a way that she associated with Sev. A woman of great beauty and dignity, a woman of Dark, who had lived through quite an ordeal and had found her peace in the House of Light. There was more to it, of course; Lily knew that at some point some years before the end of the war, Severus had done her a great favour, although what that was, Lily didn't know.

The fact that it was Slora who had been called to help with Evan's situation tonight hadn't escaped Lily's notice, either. For one reason or another, the students trusted her in these matters more than they trusted Sluggy, and that told a great deal about the current power structure in the house.

"I thought it better if Evan saw me, rather than him," Lily allowed with a light shrug. "We knew this might happen, of course, but he has to find a way of dealing with it himself."

"I agree, although it would have been better, had you taught him a charm to... contain it from his dormmates."

Surprised, Lily frowned lightly, and Slora's answer was a deep-suffering sigh.

"You are a Gryffindor; I had forgotten. He is in class with children of Death Eaters; it would have been better for him, had they not found out about this."

"You think they might use it against him? Oh, what am I saying?" she muttered to herself, finally grasping the idiocy of the situation. "I had assumed that eleven-year-old children aren't that calculating."

"Slytherin children are. And even if they aren't now, they most likely will be in the coming years, especially if what the Headmaster believes about the Dark Lord is correct. Additionally, Evan is a Half-blood whose father held a rather precarious positon during the War, and whose mother is a relatively prominent public figure and a hero of Muggle-borns. That is not likely to be forgotten."

Lily shook her head distractedly, unpleasant thoughts churning around in her mind, making her tighten her hold on her child unconsciously.

"I admit that I had never given the future much thought in that regard, not after the War was over."

"Perhaps you should discuss it with your husband."

Evan looked half-asleep when Lily carried him back to his bed, and she got to see some of the Slytherin quarters along the way, surprised by how soothing the green tones were to the eyes. When she'd been at Hogwarts, it had been far too dangerous for Severus to bring her here openly, and though she had snuck in once or twice in later years, she'd never been this deep in.

After she'd tucked her little boy in and returned with Kyla to the older woman's quarters, the Hogwarts professor addressed her in a decidedly more business-like manner. "Just one more thing, if you please, Lily. Since we were on the topic of the War and Hogwarts business, are you aware of what the Headmaster has in this building right now?"

"What is that?"

"A three-headed dog, guarding something we are told is of utmost importance and value."

"What, in the castle?"

Slora gave her a flat look that seemed to be rather scathing.

"On the third floor, in a corridor supposedly cut off from the rest of the school. As you are well aware, nothing is unreachable in Hogwarts."

Lily pursed her lips, thinking it over. Dumbledore was hiding something by letting everyone know plainly where it was. So, this must be what that project Severus was working on for the Headmaster was. A lure for someone, perhaps; a carrot on a stick. She would have to discuss this with the Headmaster.

"Have the children been warned about it?"

"You know something; no, Severus knows something," Slora decided, shrewd light green eyes meeting the closed dark green ones. "Yes, the children have been warned not to attempt visiting the third floor corridor on pain of death. Which, naturally, means that at least one person will attempt it in the coming days, most likely the Weasley twins, although I would not discount Harry Potter's group."

"It might be beneficial to let slip the kind of danger that is on the third floor," Lily pointed out. "Since I'm fairly certain that Dumbledore didn't see fit to actually explain what it is that is so dangerous. Forewarned is forearmed."

"I have no doubt something of the sort can be done. Nevertheless, if you could prevail upon the Headmaster to move the thing at his earliest convenience..."

Lily nodded decisively. "Yes, I'll do that. Thank you for bringing it to my attention," she added, stepping towards the fireplace. It was half past four, and she wanted to catch a few more hours of sleep before going into work. Saturdays were always busiest.

At least Albus had been good enough to temporarily unlock the restraints on the faculty's fireplace in the middle of the night, else there would have been a cold walk over school grounds still waiting for her.

"I think I can see what drew Severus to you," Slora said, extending her hand, which Lily grasped firmly and shook once. "I had my doubts, but he and I were never close enough for me to say anything on the matter, and, of course, with my own situation as it had been at the time, I doubt I'd had any right, either. You might want to ask him to explain the Slytherin structure in some detail to you, however, so that you can mitigate threats in advance. As you've said, forewarned is forearmed."

"Yes, I believe I'll have to do that, won't I?" Lily answered, the words leaving bad taste in her mouth. She'd worked in politics for four years, and even now had to contend with it from time to time, but she honestly detested it. That her child had ended up having to deal with it at eleven was maddening.

"Evan does belong in Slytherin," Slora said, as if reading her thoughts. "No matter your preference, your child is a good fit for it. He will learn to handle situations with delicacy here."

 _Which he wouldn't have been able to do, had he been a Gryffindor_. Lily clenched her teeth, finally seeing the Snake inside the woman in front of her. She may have thought that Lily was not a bad match for Severus, but she still disdained of Lions, and nothing would change it.

Well, it was not something Lily could do anything about. Like it or not, wizards and witches of Great Britain were marked by the House they belonged to, because it easily distinguished them into types of people, and everyone liked their worlds neatly classified. This was why she made certain to steer discussion away from house affiliation, and why she had privately agreed with the few members of the Council who'd wanted the House system abolished.

"Good night, Kyla."

"Good night, Lily."

Then she was through the Floo and finally able to take a cleansing breath, feeling as if she'd emerged out of the den of a very dangerous predator.

* * *

Ultimately, Evan was unable to go back to sleep that night. After his conversation with Theo, his mind got away from him and reminded him that this was probably the last time he'd see his mother in almost four months, effectively keeping him away and fighting tears for most of the rest of the night. Saying good bye to his parents at the train station had been part of the experience of starting Hogwarts, and he'd managed to approach it as such. Now, however, the pain of separation was hitting him fully, and all he truly wished was to have a good cry.

He couldn't do that, however, because others might hear him, and after last night, he didn't need to give them any more fodder. Even if Theo made sure the others didn't witness it again, and even if Sivney Slora managed to stop the others from using it against him, he still didn't feel secure enough to allow himself this, even behind closed curtains.

So, around half past five, he got up, dressed himself, and went to the library, Stheno dozing in his arms, where he proceeded to scrutinise every single potions recipe in his father's old textbook and, using any source he could find, tried to optimise the processes. It was a mental challenge he knew would distract him from his emotions – his homesickness – and it was the best he could do.

He hadn't expected to run into anyone, let alone that loud Ravenclaw girl he'd met on the train, the one Potter and Weasley had called know-it-all. Her misery mirroring his own to at least an extent, he surprised himself by actually finding her open curiosity and astonished naiveté appealing. It probably had something to do with his conversation with Theo some hours ago.

When they left the library for breakfast, he was still debating on whether he really wanted to meet up later in the day with her to go over this week's homework. Granted, he'd promised her to help with her potion, but she wasn't of his house, and he'd heard plenty of stories from grown-up about inter-house fraternisation to be weary of it. It didn't really seem to him like their stories made much sense nowadays, what with the mixed classes and the lax seating and all the various clubs that had all become so prominent due to the reforms, but it was hard to escape the preconceived notions he'd developed by listening to his father's scathing remarks or her mother's disappointed remembrances. He wished his mum and dad were here to help him out, and what little his mood had lifted vanished into thin air.

He spent most of breakfast moving his food around his plate and generally torturing it with his utensils, wallowing in his sadness and not quite paying attention to the things around him. This was why a violent seating of someone to his right startled him enough he nearly spilled his juice with his hand.

Sivney Slora had taken a seat beside him even though the Great Hall was empty enough she could have chosen to sit anywhere she liked.

"Mornin'," she said, reaching for the bread and jam to his left. "Sleep any since last night?"

"Do I look like I slept?" he asked testily.

"Sure don't," she confirmed, seemingly unaffected by the vitriol in his voice. "So, what's got you so down? Aside from last night, I mean."

"Nothing."

"I've been told that firsties feel homesick quite often. Not that I know anything about it; I see Mum every day."

"Well lucky you."

"Yup. Dinah, hi!" she exclaimed, waving at a girl that had just entered the Great Hall, a blonde, tanned one who looked probably Sivney's age. Evan, with some surprise, noted that the girl's robes were hemmed in yellow.

"Are you friends with her?"

"Yup; we used to go to the same preschool in Edinburgh before Mum and I moved here. I didn't even know she was a witch 'till we met up on the train. We're in drama club together, now."

"She's a Hufflepuff," Evan noted lightly. Of all the houses, he honestly didn't expect a Slytherin to be hanging out with a Hufflepuff.

"Sure; what's that got to do with anything?"

"You're seriously asking me that?"

The older girl shrugged. "Well, I suppose you're in a more sticky situation, with Blondie and the rest of'em. No one's gonna look at me twice, though. Besides, Slyths are all a little uptight about that sorta thing. It's honestly just stupid. Anyone cunning enough to be in Salazar Slytherin's house should see the benefit of havin' connections outside of their own immediate circle. 'Sides, it's not healthy to not have true friends. Jus' look at all the Death Eaters who ended up following You-Know-Who because they were insecure and wanted life affirmation."

"That's true," Evan agreed. "Can't say I've met many Slytherins who would think that."

"Meh, that's just because the Hat's gone senile, puttin' people in the Houses of their parents all the time. Weasleys are a good example; did you know that _all_ of them ended up in Gryffindor? That's just ridiculous, they're all completely different in temperament. I'll tell you a secret, though."

"What's that?" Evan asked, interested in spite of himself. Sivney had a lightness to her that definitely soothed his sadness away.

"I coulda been in Hufflepuff, too." She gave him a wicked grin before biting into her bread. "The Hat was honestly considering it, went on and on about my loyalty and hard work. Apparently, it couldn't fathom that a Slytherin could have those qualities. Finally, I just told it I thought I was a better fit in the Snake Den, and it had to agree. Has nothing to do with Mother, either, my birth father was a Hufflepuff."

"So? Your mum's still basically our Head of House."

"Ah, but I'm adopted, didn'tcha know? Mum's not my biological mother, she's like my second cousin once removed or something." That's right, Professor Slora had mentioned something of the like last night; he'd forgotten. "Took me in when Da died, 'cause we're all that's left of the Slora family."

"Oh; I thought she'd married into the family."

"Nope; she used to be married to a Yaxley, but he died in the war, too, like m'da."

"But her last name is Slora, not Yaxley," Evan pointed out, careful not to react to the infamously Dark last name of Professor Slora's deceased husband. In answer, Sivney just quirked her lips infuriatingly.

"Maybe I tell ya the whole story someday. Slora's better, anyway; can you imagine me being sane if I were raised a Yaxley?"

Evan wasn't quite sure she _was_ sane as was, but decided not to mention that. "I see what you mean. You know, I think you might be right about the friendship thing," he agreed, turning his eyes towards the bushy-haired girl at the next table, who was absentmindedly chewing her breakfast while she read something. She was the only person who'd offered her friendship because she'd liked him; Nott saw use in him, and the rest of the Slytherins weren't his friends; even Sivney was talking to him out of pity for a homesick firstie. She may not have wanted something from him, but Evan knew that she, like all the other Snakes, would have been willing to use their friendship if she needed to. That was what made her a Snake, because even those who were not by nature in this way found it very hard to survive the schooling in this House unless they adopted that way of thinking. Hermione was really almost a Gryffindor in the way she looked at things, being horrified by cheating and whatnot. Frankly, it would be a relief not to have to think twice about every single thing other people said to him all the time.

"I'm off, kid, but ya need anythin', find me. I've got some clout 'round the House."

"Sure, Sivney. Thanks."

"Don't mention it."

And the girl was off, moving without obvious care to sit with her friend at the Hufflepuff table and seemingly completely oblivious to the few cross looks she received from her own table. Hufflepuffs didn't seem at all surprised, really, just a little resigned, which Evan took as a good sign (he'd noticed days ago that the seating wasn't all that strict – here and there, students of different Houses chose to sit at a different table in order to spend time with their friends, and no one much complained about it; it was, in Evan's opinion, a stark difference to what he'd heard his parents describe, when such seating had been nearly unimaginable). Grabbing the last piece of his sandwich, he swallowed his own apprehension and stood up, moving with intention towards the Ravenclaw table to sit beside Hermione. This was not the time of his parents, he firmly told himself. It was not, and he was eleven years old; he was allowed to be friends with whomever he chose, like any other eleven-year-old should have been.

Hermione's shy smile when she noticed him join her and peer at her book – _Hogwarts, a History –_ chased away any doubts he might have had on the account. Sivney was right; it wasn't natural for people not to have true friends, and Evan thought that the know-it-all girl next to him might just be one worth keeping.

* * *

By the first Sunday of his stay at Hogwarts, Harry was finding that being in a boarding school had some very big downsides. The first and foremost of those was the fact that he wasn't allowed to sleep in until eleven, like he tended to do when he was home and his tutoring with Remus was in the afternoon.

The breakfast was from seven to eight, and though it _was_ moved an hour later over the weekend, it still meant that Harry had to get up at least by eight-thirty if he wanted to eat anything at all. He didn't think to ask Sirius about where the kitchens were until the first Saturday of term, when he ended up hungry because he'd overslept and no one had thought to wake him up.

Another really annoying thing was the fact that the prefects were more than difficult to avoid. The curfew for first-years was ten in the evening; Harry had thought that the upper-years wouldn't care, but apparently they did, because one or the other was up in their dorms on the dot, to make sure that they'd gotten ready for bed. Percy was usually the one who took that spot, though the other two prefect boys – Jonah Lewinston and Bernard Chiselworth – did the rounds from time to time. They'd gotten a speech on what was expected of them as Gryffindors right after the Welcoming Feast, about sticking up for each other and rising up to the expectations of their house, about protecting their housemates and not being afraid to act when necessary, but they'd also been warned that they were expected to listen to their Head of House and the prefects, and, apparently, things had changed enough from the Marauders' days that they now had a _bedtime_.

But these were all small things. No, the big thing that bugged Harry was that he couldn't go off wherever he wanted in his free time; the professors expected the students to keep to the open areas of the castle, even though the most interesting things were in the parts that were not currently in use, and it seemed that there was always someone who stymied the Gryffindor boys' attempts at exploration. Wasn't that the whole _point_ of having the magical school held in a magical castle, that the students got their chance of exploring all of little hidden nooks and crannies?

Those kind of worries took a back seat to the fact that their lessons began in earnest the second week of September, and they were bloody _demanding_. Harry had been home-schooled, and Remus had covered all the things that Harry would need to have it relatively easy in his first year; the problem, of course, was that Harry hadn't paid all that much attention to the more Muggle subjects. The very first English lesson, Professor Kleinschuster assigned them _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ by Jules Verne and told them that she expected them all to have read it by the end of the month; Harry had only ever heard of the story because Remus had gifted him the bloke's other book, _Around the World in Eighty Days_ , for his last birthday (not that he'd read it; books came a distant second – or fifth, or tenth, depending – after flying and playing Quidditch and learning magic). Ethics Class was also taught by Elena Kleinschuster, and the construct of the class was much the same because of it, with plenty of reading and a lot of discussion afterwards. Mathematics was somewhat boring, because it didn't take Harry too long to figure out the concepts Professor Vector taught, but she still had to take it slow for the other students, so he usually ended up doodling on the edges of his notebook. She also gave them plenty of homework, which was, if not really difficult, then definitely time-consuming. Latin was much harder than English, but Harry was quick to notice the similarities between it and Italian, and he did have a mind for memorising words, so even if he was a little rubbish in grammar, he figured it wasn't that big a deal, so long as he could use his knowledge to communicate (which was, really, the whole point of a language, wasn't it?). Science was about as boring as Herbology, though he really did like Professor Florrel; the American taught his class so as to make it as interesting as possible. It was more that Harry had absolutely no interest in plants at all, that made him dislike the class. Still, he didn't miss how what he learned in Science complemented what he learned in Herbology, so at least it felt like learning two things for the price of one.

Muggle Culture and Sociology, however, were brilliant. Enya and Professor Ajax were definitely his favourite teachers; absolutely different to one another, the girl being an exuberant, short-tempered instructor, and the burly man, a veritable walking well of knowledge, which he imparted in a calm, trance-inducing manner that had the whole room spell-bound.

Muggle Culture for the first week focused on comparisons to the wizarding world, and Enya had the whole class – even most of the sullen Slytherins – fully involved throughout, prompting them to guess the functions of various Muggle objects and clearly introducing them to the idea of laughing at themselves whenever they got something outrageously wrong. Suffice it to say that her attempts weren't well received, so it wasn't too surprising that Harry only learned of the method behind her madness when he heard the Ravenclaw know-it-all talking to the Slimy Snake about it; the girl had been as confused as Harry on the point, and the Slytherin had explained, with a gleeful smirk, that Enya was _conditioning_ the stuck-up Pure-bloods, who'd probably grown up learning stupid Pure-blood hierarchies and behaviours until they were completely clueless when it came to socialising with anyone not raised like they were, on how not to be so touchy and standoffish so that the other houses would see them as the kids they were, rather than the last names they carried. Granger had then thoughtfully commented on the other twin's teaching of Wizarding Culture – apparently, Aoife was in the habit of gently pointing out how certain offhand comments made by Muggle-borns wouldn't be well-received by those raised in the wizarding world, and ways in which the world they'd now entered held to its traditions so that neglect of the understanding of those traditions seemed very insulting to most Pure-bloods.

Sociology, on the other hand, focused on the concepts of a society and the way societies worked, irrespective of their relation to magic. Professor Ajax had a neat little trick, where he gave a rather complex description and explanation of one point, leading the students to think that he was speaking of a magical society, only to casually throw in a clarification that he was actually speaking of a Muggle one; vice-versa was also common. Harry caught on to _this_ tactic immediately – he was very effectively underlining the point that sociology did not differ between wizarding and Muggle.

History wasn't nearly as bad as Sirius had claimed it had been in his day; Professor Birdwhistle alternated between the magical and the Muggle side of an event, focusing primarily on the History of Magic, but not slacking off on the way it tied to the wider events occurring in the world during a certain time period. Not that they could have covered much in two weeks of classes, but it was long enough to figure out how the rest of the year would go, and Harry didn't mind it in the least. Birdwhistle was more formal than Remus in explaining a point, and clumsier going about it than Ajax, but he _did_ know his stuff and was always open to clarifying something a student hadn't understood, which made Harry like him quite a bit. He also tended to leave the purely Muggle side very open-ended, and Harry had turned to Dean's knowledge of the events more than once, even going so far as to ask the professor if there was a book they could take from the library to learn more about the events (in his defence, it _was_ about the Greco-Persian wars, and wars interested him enough that he was willing to crack a book open to read about them).

As for the other magical subjects, Transfiguration was, as he'd thought it would be, one of his two favourite subjects. Professor McGonagall taught in a way that wasn't even similar to the way the Marauders had taught him, but he found that their basics complemented very nicely with her more technical explanations, and he'd gotten two commendations from the professor by the end of the second week; she'd gone as far as to say that he truly was his father's son, which Harry took to be the height of praise.

His other favourite subject was, perhaps, the biggest let-down of the year. Professor Quirrell was a stuttering, insecure mess, whose stupid turban stank to high heaven of garlic, and whose attention always made Harry's head ache unpleasantly. Oh, he still loved DADA, though it had nothing to do with Quirrell. One letter to Sirius, and both Marauders were sending Harry far more interesting takes on whatever lesson he had with the stuttering professor. The rest of his Junior Marauders were grateful enough for the assistance, and in little less than two weeks, they were already trying to find ways of skiving off the class. In Harry's mind, there was no point to sitting in class with a headache, when he was able to learn all the same things in a fraction of the time with one letter from Remus.

Potions continued to be more than a little annoying; Slughorn continued to fawn over both Harry and Snape. One good thing was that, at least, Neville seemed to have settled in a little better with Snape as his partner, rather than Zabini; as much as it pained him to admit (and it really did), Harry was well aware of the fact that Snape was leaving everyone else in the dust, and that his patience for Neville's clumsiness was deeper than the other Gryffindors would have thought.

Charms were fun, and came almost as easily to Harry as Transfiguration had, though Granger was the definite best student in their year in this subject. Flitwick was entertaining and had a flair for a little dramatic, which Harry could well appreciate, having grown up with Sirius Black as a guardian. He was quick to master the simple first-year spells, as well, so he tried to help his friends whenever they needed it; Dean, surprisingly, was quite capable of figuring things out for himself, even though he had absolutely no background in Magical Theory, one of their electives from third year on, and one that both Sirius and Remus had sternly impressed on Harry was necessary if he was to learn the Animagus Transfiguration; Seamus and Ron, on the other hand, were much slower to pick up stuff, with diametrically different results – where Ron tended to underperform to the point of not accomplishing the spell at all, Seamus tended to go so far as to blow the object of the spell up. Neville was almost as bad, fluctuating between the two extremes depending on what type of charm they were attempting.

Unfortunately, after the third time this had happened, Flitwick had decided to pair the clumsy Lions with the far more competent Eagles, which was a disaster in the making – the Ravenclaws (and the bushy-haired know-it-all bookworm Granger especially) had little patience for explaining, or if they did, their explanations ended up being utterly impractical, if not outright useless. Suffice it to say that Harry was quite looking forward to the big Charms Class pot boiling one of these days (just so long as he had enough time to duck and cover when it did).

And, though Harry wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, he found himself missing Sirius so much from time to time that he got distracted from whatever his fellow Junior Marauders were saying. Only then did he finally understand why his guardian had suggested he got an owl familiar – Cybèle was indispensable to him on those evenings when he felt down. She flew back and forth between Hogwarts and London quite often, but for the most part, when Harry found himself desperately wishing to feel Padfoot's enormous form sleeping at his feet, wishing that he could run his hands through the soft black fur and scratch under the grim-dog's large ears, his beautiful snowy owl would somehow know, and she'd fly in through the window to land in his lap, so that Harry would have at least one warm, comforting presence to soothe his frayed nerves. She wasn't like Snitch; his golden retriever had been a loyal and intelligent animal, but Harry had always compared him to Sirius' Animagus form, and though he was sure his guardian would have secured Dumbledore's permission for Harry to bring his dog with him to Hogwarts had Snitch lived, the eleven-year-old boy now found himself quite satisfied with a bird instead. She seemed to understand him better than his dog had, perhaps because she had been bred to be a magical familiar, or because there truly _was_ something magical about her, and now that he was so busy all the time, he rather thought he would have not had the time to give to a dog. Snitch had been his first true responsibility, and no one knew better than Harry that dogs, for all their rewards, were hard work, requiring exercise and feeding and attention that he doubted he would have had in him, not with this sort if busy schedule.

Perhaps that was why the first-years were allowed only cats, owls or toads – because all three of these species were very low-maintenance. That wasn't to say that Cybèle _didn't_ require his time, but she was the one who brought him words of his family and friends, and she was the one who was content to not see him but for fifteen minutes before he went to bed each day. She was also the one who watched over him from up high, and who seemed happy to roost in her cage in his dormitory if she sensed that he wanted her close, but also the one who got snitty with him if he didn't offer her his bacon, and who didn't hesitate to smack him upside the head with her wing or nip him with her beak if she thought he was doing something she didn't approve of or was not as careful with her feathers as she expected him to be. Snitch, though he'd watched over Harry whenever Padfoot had had to go run with Moony, had always been a joyful bundle of energy, ready to play with the child and never seeming too cross, even when Harry got a little too rough with him.

Cybèle's antics certainly distracted Harry much better than anything else would have, and in his first note to Remus, he'd poured out all his appreciation and enthusiasm for the birthday gift that was his big snowy owl. The pleasure and contentment in Remus' answer was easy enough to read, and it gave Harry a warm feeling in his tummy, because Harry and Sirius were all the family Remus had left, and witnessing how much simple words scribbled on a piece of paper meant to him told Harry that, though his parents weren't alive to see him, he wasn't alone, either, not so long as he had the two Senior Marauders taking care of him.

So it was that the life at Hogwarts wasn't exactly what he'd expected, but if honestly asked, Harry was certain that he was thoroughly enjoying it in spite of all the challenges that came with it, because through it all, he had his friends, his trusted familiar, and the support of the two men whom he considered family.

And that was more than enough for him.

* * *

 **A/N:** Regarding night terrors - I have no personal experience with this condition, so all my knowledge of it comes from research. Apologies for what I might have gotten wrong.


	9. Ch 8: The Unleasant Surprises

**Chapter 8: The Unpleasant Surprises**

By the second Friday of the school year, Harry's little quartet was nearly jumping on their toes in excitement as they walked into the Great Hall for dinner. They'd spent the week planning the best prank _ever_ on the Slytherins, and they were about to see it in action.

It turned out each of the boys could contribute something to the cause. Harry was the most familiar with spells, and he had a host of good pranks to recycle from the Senior Marauders' days; Ron, who had grown up with his pranking twin brothers, also had a few very good suggestions, especially about the castle itself, not to mention that his natural tendency to strategize came in very handy; Dean, aside from being very good at faking other people's handwriting, gave ideas that wouldn't have crossed the minds of the other three, since his were of Muggle origin, and therefore required no magic to do; and Seamus' evil streak and tendency to blow things up insured that he was the one to do the pranks.

Their first attempt was a spectacularly hilarious one, though somewhat painful for the far right table, and all it required was a letter to Sirius in order to find the kitchens (and to ask the details about that one prank the Senior Marauders had pulled in their fifth year), a letter to Dean's half-brothers asking for a large quantity of thumbtacks, a heap of practice of a useful temporary invisibility charm targeting small objects from a book they found in the library, and some after-curfew wanderings while the house-elves were off cleaning the castle.

While Dean assured them it was a very basic prank in the Muggle world, most wizards had little concept of things such as cork boards and thumbtacks, and, in Ron's words, it was better to start small and build up to something unforgettable, than showing all their cards on the first try.

Breakfast was a buffet-type meal, and students were free to come and go as they woke up. Lunch was a light affair between classes, an on-the-go style meal. At dinner, however, especially on Friday, the Great Hall tended to be packed with students catching up with one another and their activities over the week. Moreover, the Hall itself was usually one of the quieter places older students used for study before all the classes let out, which almost guaranteed that the tables wouldn't be set before the maximum number of people possible had already entered it.

Sirius' letter gave them all the information they needed about the way food and eating cutlery were transported from the kitchens to the Great Hall. Unfortunately, there were no sitting benches in the kitchen, so the original prank had to be tweaked a little, but in all, it wasn't a difficult thing to pull off.

Food, plates, goblets and eating utensils appeared on the four tables at promptly seven in the evening. The newly-named Junior Marauders pretended to be engrossed with piling food on their plates, while discretely (in their opinion; not so in the opinion of the professors) observing the Slytherin table.

The first yelp of pain came not moments afterwards, as several students whose hands and arms had been resting on the table when everything, including napkins, appeared, almost to the last one, snatched their arms away from the table. Napkins, plates, knives, forks and spoons clattered to the ground, and even some pumpkin juice seemed to have been spilled in the commotion. The other students, both Slytherin and from other houses, all turned to see what was going on, but, as there wasn't anything visible that could explain it, either sniggered, snorted, shook their heads or rolled their eyes, and turned back to eating.

The lull lasted only until the fastest eaters finished and reached for their napkins to wipe their mouths or hands. Then, sniggering to themselves, the four Gryffindors watched as, one after another, the students experienced what their housemates had at the beginning of the meal, yelping and exclaiming in pain as the invisible thumbtacks hidden in the napkins pricked their skin.

By the end, when the whole table had had the presence of mind to figure out what was going on, there was so much spilled food, utensils and liquid all around them that Harry had no doubt the house elves would be at it come morning.

The Slytherin table swore, prolifically and imaginatively, some even yelling out threats left and right, while the Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Gryffindor tables roared with laughter, until finally, McGonagall had to amplify her own voice to be heard over the commotion as professors hurried to check that no one was seriously hurt. They weren't, of course – the thumbtacks weren't that long, and at most, some had simply broken the surface layer of skin and drawn a little bit of blood. Still, they were invisible, so no doubt most had ended up littered in the food, drinks, seats and the floor around the table, just waiting for more careless victims.

By the end of the whole fiasco, Harry was laughing so hard tears were dripping down his nose onto his plate, Ron's forehead jabbing him uncomfortably in the shoulder as his best friend laughed with him, while Seamus and Dean across from them remained half-bent, holding their stomachs from laughter cramps and leaning on each other to stay seated.

The rest of the Gryffindor table wasn't much better off, excluding Fred and George Weasley, who seemed shocked enough someone had pulled a stunt like this only two weeks into the school year that their mouths were hanging open, and were thus looking for their newest competition in the throng of some five hundred students crowding the hall (though Harry was sure they would have been laughing right along everyone else otherwise).

"Silence!" McGonagall's voice rose above the commotion. She didn't get a response, which prompted her to cast a strong Silencing Charm over the whole room, effectively imposing absolute silence. "Now then, who is responsible for this?!" her Scottish brogue tinting it heavily enough it was difficult to understand. Harry cursed his luck that Dumbledore wasn't here – no doubt he'd have just laughed with everyone else and dismissed it as just another childish prank. McGonagall, by comparison, had had to contend with the Weasley twins for the past two years as their Head of House, which had, no doubt, soured her to this kind of behaviour.

Loud meowing had everyone turning towards it, only to find a clearly juvenile grey tabby cat right in the middle of the Gryffindor table, observing the Deputy Headmistress with large blue eyes. McGonagall lifted her eyebrow questioningly.

"Whose familiar is that, and what is it doing in the Great Hall?"

After a few moments of silence, a hand rose in the air, and Harry growled silently when he figured out it was Evan Snape. McGonagall lifted the Silencing Charm off of him.

"Well, Mr Snape? I am waiting for an explanation?"

"I can't say what she's doing here," the sallow boy said, "but I think she's pointing out the culprit is sitting at that table."

"Indeed," McGonagall replied, eying the cat and the students in its vicinity. "I assume, Mr Snape, that you have proper authorisation for bringing a full-blooded Kneazle instead of a cat, as stated in the school rules?"

"Yes, Professor, my father cleared it with Headmaster Dumbledore."

"And does she know who, exactly, is responsible?"

The Slytherin gave a questioning look to the cat – no, Kneazle (no wonder the damned creature had seemed so intelligent on the train ride) – who cocked its head and gave him what amounted to an unimpressed look, as if asking ' _Do you really want me to say?_ '. Snape furrowed his brow, thought a moment, then, with one glancing look at the Junior Marauders, shook his head.

"No, ma'am."

McGonagall swept the Gryffindor table with a hard look, eyes stopping momentarily first on the Weasley twins and then on Harry's group, and the four first-years attempted to look completely innocent. Then the woman sighed and lifted the Silencing Charm completely.

"Very well, then," she said after summoning the thumbtacks (and Harry was a little surprised she'd known what they are, actually) onto a pile in front of her. "Those of you who feel they need to are dismissed to the hospital wing. The rest of you, go back to your dinners. If anyone has any information pertaining to this event, you are to come see me after you are done."

Snape, who seemed to have avoided the worst of the Attack of the Thumbtacks, remained, his Kneazle curling in his lap, while about a third of their table left, most sporting scratched arms, legs and faces and grumbling angrily under their breath. Fuming at the fact that they were singled out on their very first attempt, and all because of a stupid cat, Harry looked at his friends and motioned them to come closer so as not to be overheard.

"We need to put that git in his place, or next time he'll tell on us and I for one don't intend to spend my free time in detention," he growled.

"Yeah," Seamus and Ron agreed instantly, while Dean hesitated only a moment or two before nodding his head. That settled, they returned to eating their dinner.

* * *

When the Great Hall finally began emptying after their prank, Harry kept an eye on Snape until the other first-year finished his meal and got up from his table. He moved to the Ravenclaw one and had a brief conversation with the insufferable know-it-all, then departed the room alone.

"Now," he muttered to his cohorts, and the four Junior Marauders moved swiftly from their seats. It didn't take them long to catch up with the greasy-haired boy and his cat – no, Kneazle – in a deserted hallway that led to one of the bathrooms on the ground floor.

Before they could do much more than draw their wands, the Kneazle raised its back half high into the air, fur standing up, and hissed like a snake at them. The next moment, Snape had his wand out, as well, eying them wearily.

"What do you want, Potter?" he asked.

"What do you think, Snape?" Harry asked with a sneer. "You outed us on our first attempt."

"I did not," he replied with a snort. "You outed yourselves; honestly, with that much skill in misdirection, it's a wonder she hadn't picked you out of the crowd on the spot."

"She wouldn't have known anything if your cat hadn't interfered," Seamus said, eyes blazing.

The Kneazle hissed at him, lifting even further into the air until it looked almost ridiculous, with its large ears tilted back and its hair standing up as if electrified.

"Stheno does what she wants; you'll have to take that up with her, if you can."

"She's a cat," Dean pointed out, unimpressed. "What can she do to us?"

"She's a Kne–" Ron began, his voice cutting off abruptly as the damned animal ran at Dean with shocking speed, climbing up the side of his robes with sharp claws, clearly intent on reaching his face. Snape didn't waste any time, either. His _Furnunculus_ would have hit Ron square in the face if Harry hadn't managed to push his mate out of the way. The Slytherin ran past them, snapping his fingers towards his pet, which Seamus was unsuccessfully trying to pull away from Dean's face. The Kneazle wiggled out of Seamus' hands and, giving them parting scratches, ran after its master, leaving the four to pick themselves off the floor.

"Are you guys all right?" Harry asked them as soon as he'd pulled Ron back to his feet.

"That thing's a demon," Dean said, sniffling in pain. His hands and face were liberally scratched with shallow lines that weren't bleeding, but would scab over and be quite painful for some time. Seamus' hands weren't much better, either, because his wounds actually were bleeding sluggishly, no doubt from where the Kneazle had pushed itself away from them.

"Come on; I've got some cream for that," Ron said, helping Dean to his feet. "It works wonders. By tomorrow morning, you won't feel a thing. I use it all the time when I fall off my broom. What?" he asked Seamus defensively. "We've got old brooms, they tend to buckle."

"For future reference, Dean," Harry said sympathetically, "don't insult a Kneazle. They're much smarter than any cat, and they can definitely understand what you're telling them."

"How was I supposed to know that?!"

"We'll make sure Snape gets his for this," Seamus said forcefully.

"We have to catch him unawares, though," Ron stated. "We should have waited a few days, so that it didn't look connected to the prank."

"Then it's a good thing we let him get away so easily," Harry decided. "This way, if he reports us, we're the one who got mauled by his familiar."

"You mean the two of us did; all you two did was trip over yourselves," Seamus retorted in a sneer.

"Yes, fine, but the point is, I think we're safe as far as this goes. We'll give it a few days, let things settle down; then, we'll catch him when his fiend isn't around to defend him and teach him a lesson."

They walked in silence for the next two floors, each one musing on the best ways of getting revenge for the sustained wounds, before more important thoughts asserted themselves.

"You think Mrs Norris is a Kneazle?" Seamus asked.

"Who knows," Ron replied with a shrug. "Either way, next time we decide to ambush either Filch or Snape, make sure their cats aren't around."

"I knew Kneazles could be vicious, but I really didn't see this coming," Harry mused as they snuck past some prefects on the fifth floor. "I just thought it was a regular cat until today."

"Did you hear what he told McGonagall, that he got special dispensation from the Headmaster?" Dean said. "You were right, Harry, he really is an arse licker."

"Of course he is; all Slytherins are, one way or another," Ron replied. "Horse teeth," he told the Fat Lady, and she swung open to let them enter the Tower. They made quick work of the scratches with that cream of Ron's, and, exactly as he'd claimed, by the next morning, neither of the boys sported more than faint lines over their wounded skin.

The morning became rather boisterous when they saw the notice pinned up in the common room – mandatory first-year flying lessons were to start next Thursday, while one-semester Muggle Sports class was scheduled for Gryffindors for Friday afternoon.

"I've been looking forward to that," Seamus admitted. "Mum won't let me fly much, just when me cousin Fergus is there, and he's a git and a half."

Sports as a general topic had been covered in the past week in both Culture classes, so that the students wouldn't be completely lost during their Muggle Sports class, which was a chance for the students to decide which sports club they wanted to be part of after the winter hols. Flying classes were separate, however, and would last for one month for those students who displayed sufficient proficiency in the skill, and would remain mandatory until the end of the year for all those who didn't.

Gryffindors had Muggle Sports with Hufflepuffs, thankfully, but they'd not had such luck with Flying – they were stuck with Slytherins.

Ron moaned at the realisation, hanging his head. "And I thought it was bad enough that we had one class with them."

"We'll be fine," Harry dismissed his concern. "Aside from Dean, we all know how to fly, and I'm sure you'll pick it up easily," he assured his Muggle-born friend.

"I'll probably embarrass myself in front of them first," Dean pointed out despondently.

"Don't stress it; they're usually all talk anyway. Besides, you'll be much better at football than any of them."

"Too bad we can't see their faces then," Seamus agreed congenially. They'd all agreed to give football an honest chance, even Ron, who seemed quite uninterested in it. Still, as had been explained to them by their professor, knowing other sports would help them fit in better into the Muggle world, and many of them were challenging in very different ways to Quidditch, with which she didn't sound even a little enamoured. Harry was privately thinking that he might enjoy lacrosse, but football sounded almost as interesting.

The flying lesson turned into a fiasco quickly enough. Neville had gotten a Remembrall from his grandmother that morning, one Malfoy was quick enough to steal and mock the Gryffindor for during breakfast. The Junior Marauders had, naturally, jumped in defence of one of their housemates, and by the time McGonagall had shooed them away, the conflict was half-brewed already.

Madam Hooch was a stocky woman with boyishly short grey hair and unnatural yellow eyes that moved over the students like a hawk's. She seemed quite grouchy, but then that did appear to be her default state, if her numerous arguments over meals with other faculty members were to be taken into account, so Harry didn't give it much thought. He knew how to fly; in fact, he felt more at home in the air than on the ground. No, what his mind was on was that promise Sirius had given him a few months back, about getting him the newest model of the broom if he got on the Quidditch team.

He'd read up on that, and there was a clause, instituted some years back, that first-year students were allowed to try out for the Quidditch team, but only if both their flying supervisor and their Head of House allowed it, and the Headmaster approved it. So far, no student had yet managed to pass the try-outs, apparently because the last first-year who played (and this was about thirty-five years back) got hit so hard with a Bludger that he'd spent half a year in a coma and his parents attempted to sue the school.

Harry's plan was to impress Madam Hooch first, and then find a way to get McGonagall to agree as well. He knew Dumbledore would let him without a fuss. Then he'd get the Nimbus 2000 he wanted _and_ beat his dad's record.

The brooms they were using were older models Bluebottles, purchased three years ago when the budget for safety equipment was redesigned, after the atrocious conditions of the previous school brooms were reported. They were reliable, steady and were absolutely not used for Quidditch, being far too slow for the games. Harry remembered how chuffed the Weasley twins had been that they'd managed to avoid the old, rattling ones that Percy and the older Weasley brothers had had to use in their first years.

"Stick out your right hand over your broom," Madam Hooch said, stopping when she noticed a raised hand. "Yes?"

"I'm left-handed," Evan Snape commented lightly, earning himself a glare from their instructor.

"Yes, yes, fine, your dominant hand. Then say 'up'."

Harry didn't even need to do that much; one light thought, and the broom was in his hand, stable in balance as he tested its pull. Satisfied, he looked around, noticing that while Dean was somewhat nervous, he'd still managed to call his broom to him on his third try. Ron and Seamus had no such problems, and were grinning to one another in delight. The Two Sallys were both having some trouble, but Lavender and Padma had things well in hand. On the Slytherin side, Snape still hadn't managed to call it to himself, sharing this particular pleasure with Dumb and Dumber. Nott and Zabini were having more success, and Malfoy's was in his hand, while the girls all seemed to struggle with it.

Apparently, not all parents taught their children how to fly on broomsticks from a young age.

It took some time, but finally everyone had succeeded in this first step, so Madam Hooch proceeded to show them how to mount the broom and the proper grip. Harry and his gang sniggered like a pack of hyenas when she told Malfoy, quite dismissively, that his hold was completely wrong.

Then Neville kicked off the ground too hard and, having no control over the broom, began rising almost meteorically into the air. He lost his balance, slipped off and hit the ground just as their instructor had pulled out her wand, no doubt to cast a Cushioning Charm. The broom twirled in the air and landed some distance away.

Neville had, apparently, broken his wrist.

"None of you is to move while I take this boy to the hospital wing! You leave those brooms where they are or you'll be out of Hogwarts before you can say 'Quidditch'. Come on, dear."

Neville, whimpering and clutching his wrist, staggered beside her as she helped him keep his balance with an arm around him.

Malfoy's laughter was apparently contagious for Slytherins, since all but Snape, Nott and Davis joined in. The greasy-haired boy looked rather pale himself, eyes sympathetically trailing after Neville's disappearing shape, while Tracey Davis had a sneer on his face that could have as easily been directed towards the Gryffindor as to the other Slytherins. Nott just looked bored.

"Shut up, Malfoy!" Parvati snapped, balling her fists.

"Ooh, sticking up for Longbottom?" Parkinson sneered contemptuously. "Never thought _you'd_ like fat little crybabies, Patil."

"Go screw yourself, Parkinson," Sally-Anne shot, making all the other children gasp. As a Muggle-born, she was clearly far more comfortable with hard swearing than any of the others were. "Oh, that's right, you want to _save yourself_ for Blondie McSnot over there."

Parkinson's eyes were wider than Harry had ever seen them, and she looked genuinely shocked that someone had the guts to talk to her like that. Beside him, Dean elbowed him lightly.

"What's she mean by that?" he asked under his breath.

"Tell you later," Harry answered. "Malfoy, give that _back_!"

Malfoy had picked up Neville's Remembrall in the general confusion, which explained why he'd missed the nickname Sally-Anne had bestowed on him.

"I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to collect. How about... up a tree?"

Harry lunged for him, but Malfoy had already leapt onto his broom and was in the air by the time Harry landed back on his feet. Without a second thought, Harry was on his own broom and eye-level with the little snot, his Marauders whooping and cheering beneath him.

"You have three seconds, Malfoy. Give. It. Here."

"Or what, Potter?"

But Harry knew that he was the more expert one of them now. Half a second faster, and he would have had the Remembrall in his hands. As it was, Malfoy had managed to dip down just enough to avoid head-on collision, forcing Harry to make a sharp about turn.

"Where're your goonies now?"

Malfoy, who Harry was quite pleased to note, looked far less self-assured than three minutes before, twisted in his seat and flung the ball at the castle wall with all his might. Harry swore under his breath and leaned forwards, pushing the broom to its maximum speed. Some fifteen inches from the wall, he shot his hand out to catch the little glass trinket, while he pulled the broom up sharply, managing to turn himself parallel to the wall just in time that he could brush his toes against the cool stone. Then he was casting off it, finishing the backflip by straightening out and slowing down abruptly into a hover, grinning like a loon at the rush the manoeuvre had given him.

"That was a Crazy Ivan!" he heard Dean's voice rise up in awe just as the whistles and cheers followed it.

"It's called Vertical Vronski Feint!" Ron's voice rang out. "Man, he's good!"

" _Harry James Potter!_ "

McGonagall's voice easily overpowered the chorus, and in the dead silence that followed, Harry saw her appear nearly speechless with shock.

" _What did you think you were doing?!_ "

"Oh, someone's in trouble," Malfoy called out, having dismounted from his broom.

"I was stopping Malfoy from destroying Neville's property," Harry answered calmly, directing his broom downwards. He wasn't quite sure what to expect from her, but Sirius had said that McGonagall was pretty obsessed with Quidditch, so he assumed that he'd at least suitably impressed her, in which case the punishment for disobeying Madam Hooch's order was a price he was quite willing to pay.

" _Never_ , in all my time at Hogwarts... how _dare_ you – might have broken your neck–"

"I was in control the whole time," Harry answered testily, feeling contemptuous that his flying abilities were being brought into question. "I knew what I was doing."

"What on this Earth possessed you to do such a thing?" she questioned him, the shock waning in favour of obvious anger. "And where is Madam Hooch?"

"I _told_ you," he replied. "Malfoy was going to destroy Neville's property, after laughing at him for falling off his broom and breaking his wrist. She took Neville to the hospital wing."

"She also said not to fly the broomsticks on pain of expulsion," Parvati added, "which Malfoy did first."

"Potter, you are to come with me this instant," she ordered, and behind him, Harry heard Malfoy sniggering. "And you, Mr Malfoy, will report to me on Saturday morning for detention, and be sure that your Head of House will be notified of such conceited and rude behaviour. Ten points from both of your houses for not obeying your instructors, and another ten from Slytherin for stealing another student's property." Well, that shut the little snot up nicely.

He followed his Head of House in silence, nearly running to keep up with her brisk trot as she guided them back into the castle, past the large doors and up the staircase to the fourth floor. She poked her head into a classroom and asked for 'Wood', and when Oliver, the Gryffindor Quidditch captain, came out, Harry's spirits rose.

"Follow me, gentlemen."

She took them to the fifth floor, all the way to the other side of the castle, where she finally stopped at a statue of a gargoyle.

"Treacle tarts," she told it (Harry was thrilled to note that the password seemed to be his favourite treat) and the gargoyle moved out of the way to reveal a spiral staircase. They climbed to the top in tense silence, finally reaching a relatively large wooden door, through which McGonagall entered without even knocking.

Dumbledore was on the other side of them, so Harry took this to be his office. He would have been quite interested in studying it, if only he wasn't nearly ready to jump out of his skin from the nervous excitement he was feeling at the transpiring event.

The old Headmaster looked up from his paperwork, giving the witch a slight questioning frown.

"Harry Potter nearly killed himself flying into a wall in an attempt to catch a glass trinket belonging to Mr Longbottom," she informed the Headmaster tersely and without hesitation. "He then managed to catch it, make a back turn and stop, all within inches of the castle wall. He did not hurt a hair on his head."

"He what?" Oliver asked, sounding bewildered.

Dumbledore's eyes were solemn when he looked at Harry, and the eleven-year-old felt his cheeks warm.

"Why would you do such a thing, Harry?"

"Malfoy was making fun of Neville after he'd broken his wrist, sir," Harry answered, remembering to add the proper address at the end. "And Neville got that Remembrall just this morning from his gran. I couldn't let him get away with it."

"It is not your job to police your peers."

"Well, there were no grown-ups around," Harry replied obstinately. "We Lions stand up for one another, and Neville is one of us. And I wasn't going to kill myself; I knew when to pull up."

"Have you attempted this before, Potter?" McGonagall asked him.

"Well, not with a wall, I didn't," he admitted. "But I've done it loads of times very low to the ground, and it's sort of the same."

"You are either the most self-assured first-year, or the most foolish one, then, and I will be letting your guardian know about this." Oh, well, if that was all, then it was fine. "Additionally, you will have detention with me for the whole of Sunday." Harry's shoulders drooped. Of course that wasn't all. "Albus, I want him trying out for the Seeker position. Charlie Weasley couldn't have done the manoeuvre better."

"He does have a build for a Seeker," Oliver confirmed, still sounding a little dazed. "You'll need a decent broom."

"I believe you are putting the cart before the horse, Mr Wood," Dumbledore said, still looking quite serious. "Firstly, Harry, you will not be pulling these kinds of stunts again, are we in agreement?"

"Only if I need to do it to win the match. That is, if I get onto the team," Harry said.

"Good. Now, secondly, you are all aware of the fact that no first-year student has played for the Quidditch team in thirty-seven years."

"Only because no first-year was good enough," McGonagall countered. "You've given your permission for try-outs before, Albus."

"I have, yes. Very well; bring me signed documentation, and I will validate it."

"That means I can try out, right?" Harry asked, just to confirm. Dumbledore, in response, gave him a smile, his twinkle returned.

"Yes, Harry, that means you can try out."

The Boy Who Lived gave him a blinding smile, nearly pumping his fists in the air in his excitement.

"Yeah! I'm on the team!"

"Not just yet, Harry. Do not get carried away."

"Oh, he's as good as," Oliver confirmed easily. "We've not had decent candidates for Seeker position since Charlie Weasley first filled it out three years ago. I was quite worried we'd be flattened this year, to be honest."

McGonagall gave him a warm smile. "Aside from nearly killing yourself, Potter, that was a superb flying move. Your father would have been proud."

* * *

Malfoy's duel invitation was gladly accepted when it came that evening. The four Marauders faced off against Malfoy and his two cronies, giving them wolfish smiles and already planning their next big prank, which they'd agreed would be against Malfoy. Neville was still not back from the hospital wing, and in their opinion, twenty points and one detention weren't nearly enough punishment for the bleached snot.

Their plan to visit Neville in the hospital wing fell through when McGonagall brought the last Gryffindor first-year some half-hour before their bedtime. He looked pale and shaky, but when they congregated around him to ask him how he was, he told them that he was fine and that Madam Pomfrey had fixed his wrist right up.

They spent the next half-hour telling him all about the flying lesson, and Harry returned the Remembrall to him, which made Neville's eyes water so that he had to wipe his nose with his sleeve.

"Thanks, Harry. My gran would've killed me if I'd gotten it broken on the first day."

"It wasn't your fault," Dean pointed out, "I'm sure she wouldn't have if you'd explained it to her."

"She would have. She would have said that I should have kept my things safe."

"Well, we'll get revenge tonight, so don't worry."

"What? How?" Neville asked at the same time Harry, Ron and Seamus all yelled: "Dean!"

"Harry's having a duel with Malfoy," Seamus explained finally. "At midnight, tonight."

"For me? Oh, please don't go," Neville said, voice rising in panic. "What if you get caught? Or if you get hurt?!"

"I'm sure I know much more magic than he does," Harry told him, dismissing the point with ease. "Malfoy only knows how to talk tough, that's all. Sirius taught _me_ plenty of spells already."

"But what if it's a trap?" Neville insisted. "What if he has some older students with him who can help him out, because they're angry with that prank you did?"

"Malfoy? He's too dumb to do something like that," Seamus said derisively.

"I don't know," Ron voiced, sounding dubious enough that Harry gave him his full attention. "Malfoy is really full of himself, but I don't think he's stupid."

"What we need is that map," Harry decided. "Y'know, the Marauder's Map. I say we go get that first, then we can see if he's only with Crabbe and Goyle, or if it's an ambush."

"I thought you said that Filch took the Map," Seamus pointed out.

"So? We can break into his office; I'm sure it'll be there somewhere."

"Yeah, but what if he's there, mate?" Ron asked. "We'd just get caught."

"We need a strategy," Dean decided.

"Erm... Harry, I don't think this is such a good idea," Neville piped up nervously.

"Don't worry, Neville, everything'll be fine."

They moved to Seamus' bed, which was furthest from Neville's, where they planned out the night's events. In light of this new development, they'd all agreed that one of them would have to be the lookout, and Dean was probably the fastest runner of the lot, being well-trained for football games. Ron quickly took over the planning with some encouragement from Harry's side – Ron _was_ the best strategist of them, same as he was the best chess player – and he came up with a very reasonable plan: Seamus would stand guard in front of the door to Filch's office, while Dean would keep watch at the hallway entrance. Harry and Ron would search the office as quickly and neatly as possible, and with any luck, they'd be in and out in minutes.

They left around eleven, after extracting a promise from Neville that he wouldn't be calling anyone on them, and snuck their way to the ground floor, careful to avoid making much noise. Mrs Norris had excellent ears, and they could all think of at least one other familiar that would be quite happy to alert someone to their whereabouts.

Filch wasn't in his office; in fact, the whole corridor off the Entrance Hall leading to it was dark. Dean took his sentry post there, while Seamus, Harry and Ron hurried onwards.

"I'll find us a quick way out of here," Seamus whispered once they'd reached the correct door, and with a nod Harry approved of his idea. The office itself was locked, but all it took was an _Alohomora_ and they were in.

"I can't see a damn thing," Ron muttered; there were no windows in the office, and as a consequence, it was pitch black.

" _Lumos_ ," Harry whispered, rolling his eyes at his best mate. Ron was a brilliant strategist, but sometimes he really didn't have a lick of common sense.

"Oh, right. _Lumos_."

Ron chose to inspect the shelves lining the wall of the office, while Harry focused on the desk. It was a full-wood, heavy sort of writing desk, tall enough that its drawers could be quite deep. There wasn't anything of use on it – some quills, some parchment (Merlin forbid the ridiculous Squib use any Muggle utensils everyone else preferred). Harry focused on the drawers instead, and found them to be labelled. The bottom, deepest one had the inscription 'Confiscated and Highly Dangerous' on it.

"Bingo," he whispered, pulling it open. It took him some effort, because not only was it heavy, but it also moved with great difficulty in its tracks. By then Ron had joined him, and they started digging through it together.

There were plenty of interesting things, from a restrained Fanged Frisbee to some Dungbombs and quills, to potion bottles and even some candy. There was no map, though. In fact, there was no parchment of any kind.

"Where else could it be?"

"I don't know," Harry answered. "Let's keep digging."

They'd each taken one side of the desk and were browsing through the drawers when loud, running footsteps made them snap their heads up. Then Seamus' head poked into the office, panic clearly written on his face.

"Filch is coming; hurry."

With a simultaneous _Nox_ , they plunged the office back into darkness, almost tripping over their own feet in their hurry to get out. Dean nearly barrelled into them as they emerged, and, muffling their squeaks of surprise and pain, the four boys started sprinting down the corridor while Filch and his ugly cat ran after them, yelling: "Come back here, you little miscreants! Stealing from me, will you?!"

"Over here," Seamus breathed out, turning suddenly behind a statue where, to their surprise, was a very narrow staircase. He slipped on the first step, and crashed forward with a very pained yelp, Ron and Dean tripping over him and falling into a tumble. Harry, who was last, managed to jump over them in the last second, but he did bang his knee on one of the steps.

"Quick, get up, get up!" he whisper-yelled, pulling Dean to his feet. "Come on!"

"You won't get away from me," Filch's voice floated towards them, closer than Harry would have liked. Together, the Junior Marauders stumbled to their feet and ran up the stairs, which were very narrow and very, very steep. By the time they emerged on the other end, all four were breathing heavily and with legs burning at the knees, though not in the clear yet – Filch's footsteps were discernible behind them, amplified by the tube-like shape of the stairwell.

They ran onwards through the unfamiliar part of the castle, Filch hot on their heels, though the boys were gaining some distance now that it had turned into a marathon, rather than a sprint. They would have given him the slip, too, had Peeves not found it interesting to place a suit of armour right on their path.

Seamus managed to pull Dean's arm just in time for the two boys in front to avoid it, and Harry had to slide almost to the floor and push himself off with his arms to make the sharp turn left, but Ron didn't have Harry's dexterity or Seamus' foresight, and ended up falling on his bum in his efforts not to crash head-first into it.

Peeves, who was watching this from his position somewhere near the ceiling, cackled gleefully at them: "Ickle firsties out of bed, running too fast so you'll smack your head!"

"Come on, Ron!" Harry exclaimed, tugging on Ron to help him get up, while the red-haired boy groaned and struggled to keep steady on his feet. Dean and Seamus were well ahead of them, so the two Gryffindors put in the last of their strength into a burst of speed and fought to catch up to their friends.

What they found was a dead-end in the form of a locked door.

"We're done for!" Seamus said, hysteria creeping into his voice.

"Don't be daft," Harry told him harshly. " _Alohomora_."

As one, they piled into the room and shut the door behind them, breathing heavily. Through the door, they could hear Filch asking Peeves where they'd go, and Peeves promising that he 'shan't say nothing if you don't say please', and then saying 'nothing' when Filch finally did grudgingly say 'please'.

"He thinks the door is locked," Harry concluded when the sound of a lot of metal clanking together came through the door.

"Great; now we have to wait until he moves that stupid thing," Ron grumbled. "That'll take forever, and my bum hurts."

"Erm, Harry..." Dean voiced, voice pitched into a height Harry didn't think he could manage. Really, it sounded more like a squeak than anything else.

"Yeah?"

"Harry..."

Annoyed, Harry turned to look at his friend, only to stop short at his wide eyes and pale face. With trepidation, he turned further into the room, only to discover that it wasn't a room at all, but a corridor. The forbidden corridor, that was, and now he finally understood _why_ it was forbidden – there was an enormous three-headed dog that looked like it had rabies, with saliva dripping from its mouths and eyes that rolled in their sockets.

"Oh, Merlin..." he breathed out, effectively making Ron and Seamus figure out where they'd ended up.

Without further thought, Harry twisted the doorknob he was still holding and let them all tumble out, just as the freaking thing made its move towards them. Seamus managed to shut the door with his foot just as one of the heads lunged at it, and a painful squeal reverberated through the wood.

Breathing heavily, Harry scrambled to his feet and stepped away from the door, his friends right there with him. His heart was ringing so loudly in his ears that he couldn't hear whether Filch was still there or not. Not that it mattered much; the door rattled on its hinges forcefully as the head banged against it, and one or two more shoves would have the wooden barrier flying off them completely.

Harry decided not to stick around to find out how many attempts it would take for that monster to break through. By the time another head had moved to bang on the door again, he was running with his friends down the corridor, heart beating wildly in his chest, whooshing sound in his ears, and with a feeling that he was going so fast he might trip and fall any second.

That was, unfortunately, exactly what happened when they turned the corner – the four Gryffindor eleven-year-olds bowled straight into Filch, who was just about done setting the stupid suit of armour back in its position.

With an unholy racket, five humans and one suit crashed to the ground in a heap, metal pieces flying every which way, and Peeves cackling insanely above them.

"Get up, get up, get up!" Harry yelled, scrambling out of the pile and to his feet as fast as he could. Filch was down, but if he figured out who they were, they'd be in detention until Christmas. He had no intention of living through that whatsoever. So, with a mighty pull, he managed to drag Seamus out, while Dean, who'd been first in line and thus the one at the very bottom of the pile, had to be extricated from Filch's leathery hands by Ron.

They were almost successful, but Filch managed to recover before Ron had fully pulled Dean out, and with shocking speed managed to grab the Muggle-born's ankle.

"You won't get away now," Filch growled as Dean squeaked in fright. Harry, without really thinking, jumped into the fray, aiming the heel of his foot towards Filch's elbow. He missed by only a little, his foot landing on the man's forearm, but that was quite enough to make him let go of Dean's leg.

Finally free, the four Gryffindors sprinted down the corridor and towards their tower, barely breathing and fighting through burning extremities and fatigue, fuelled more by adrenalin than anything else. They managed to slip into the Gryffindor common room without further incident, waiting only long enough for the Fat Lady to close her portrait before practically sprawling on the ground against it, the midnight duel completely forgotten.

"Oh, god..." Dean croaked weakly. "Oh, god, oh, god, oh, god."

"Merlin," Seamus corrected him distractedly trough heaving breaths. "You say... 'oh, Merlin'... here."

The eventfulness of the evening, coupled with his observation, made Harry burst into a fit of giggles that caused stomach cramps, so that he had to curl into himself until tears ran out of his eyes. The other boys – except for Dean, who still seemed shell-shocked – joined in quickly, until they were a guffawing mass on the floor by the entrance to the common room.

How they didn't wake anyone up, Harry would never really be able to figure out.

"What... the hell... was... that thing... doing there?" Seamus asked – or, more accurately, gasped between snorts and giggles.

"If any dog needs exercise... that one does," Ron concluded.

"There was a door on the floor, by its paw," Dean informed them, the only one who'd not thought his comments that funny. "Like a trapdoor, for a basement or something."

His words were relatively effective at diverting the attention of the other three, as they were now looking at him with curiosity, rather than dying of laughter on the ground.

"On the third floor?" Harry asked, incredulous, though other thoughts were already competing for his attention. "I wonder what's in there."

"I don't; I'll be happy never to step foot in that room again," Dean categorically answered, shaking his head. "Did you get the Map at least?"

"It wasn't there," Ron said despondently. "We searched everywhere."

"Someone must have already nicked it," Harry decided. "We just have to figure out who it is and hope that they're still at Hogwarts, so that we can take it back from them."

"Well, so long as we do nothing else tonight, you can plan it all you like," Seamus grumbled, trudging towards their dorm room. Dean was quick to follow him, the two boys muttering something under their breaths and leaving Harry and Ron alone in the room.

"It was guarding something," Harry told his best friend quietly. "The dog; it must have been."

"That package from Gringotts," Ron answered instantly. "It has to be it."

"You're right; guess we figured out where that went, haven't we?"

* * *

 _Dear Sirius,_

 _I am awesome. And you owe me the Nimbus 2000._

 _Malfoy, the git nicely dubbed Blondie McSnot by the awesome Sally-Anne (she's one of the four Gryffindor girls of my year), stole Neville's (Remembal) Remembrall during flying lessons yesterday. That thing is just stupid, by the way. What's the use of knowing you've forgotten something, if you don't know what you've forgotten? But, it was a present from his gran, and you know how crazy scary Madam Longbottom is, so I couldn't very well let that bleached snake just take it. Neville was in the hospital wing at the time, and Hoochey had to go with him, so she told us not to fly. Obviously, Malfoy didn't listen, so I followed him. I can fly circles around the guy, just so you know. _

_Malfoy threw the (Remembal) Remembrall (I hate the stupid name of that stupid thing) at the castle wall, and I pulled a Vertical Vronski Feint (Dean called it a 'Crazy Ivan', do you have any idea what that is?) to catch it. McGonagall saw me, so now I've gotten permission to try out for the team, as a Seeker. Oliver, he's our captain, says that I'm guaranteed to get in._

 _See, I'm awesome. And I remember that you said that if I got onto the Quidditch team, you'd buy me a new broom. My first match would be in November._

 _You have to come watch, also._

 _We tried to find the Map, but it's not in Filch's office. Are you sure he wouldn't just throw it out? What if someone else found it? Would they be able to figure out the password? We had to run away from Filch, though, he chased us all over the castle, but we gave him the slip. Nothing's happened yet today, so I think we're safe, though I do have detention on Sunday because of 'nearly braining myself against the wall'. That's not true, though, I knew exactly what I was doing and I was in control the whole time._

 _Oh, by the way, did you know that there's a three-headed dog in the school? It's guarding something for Dumbledore, we're sure. Have you any clue what it might be?_

 _I'll write to you again later, Dean and Seamus are finally ready to go to dinner, and Ron's been moaning about the pudding for the whole day._

 _Junior Marader Extraordinair_

 _Harry James Potter_


	10. Ch 9: The Fallacy of Powerful People

**Chapter 9: The Fallacy of Powerful People**

"Kindly get your head out of my fireplace, cur."

"Or what, Snivellus? You'll hex me?"

"You assume I would be as obvious as you; I'm shocked that you have managed to hold your position for so long with such stunted thinking."

"I remember quite a few... _creative_... hexes and curses I used on you at school. A few of them were even your own, weren't they? Snivelly?"

"And I remember that instance my wife had to sit you down and explain to you why your whoring ways should not be in reach of toddlers. That was a rather embarrassing moment for you, wasn't it?"

"You know James would hav– oh, hello, Lily. I was just looking for you."

Sirius smiled brightly, pointedly looking away from Severus as the redhead leaned against the door to her living room, arms crossed over her chest, still in her pyjamas and a housecoat. His head was floating in their fireplace, while Severus was standing close to it, dressed only in loose pants and a shirt, the shadow of a beard still dusting his cheeks and chin.

"It's six-thirty in the morning," she pointed out. "Not that I don't like your tendency to pop in whenever you feel like it, but could you've waited one hour more?"

"Only half six?" Sirius asked, blinking at her in slight surprise. "I assumed... I've not yet gotten to bed, see, so I lost track of time."

Now that he'd said it, she could see the slightly crazed look he always got when he was on caffeine high. While nicotine for some reason did little to nothing for the magical folk, coffee was as effective as it was to non-magicals in raising energy levels. She herself was quite a fan of it, though Severus preferred tea.

"What is it you wanted?"

"I wanted to see if you know anything about a three-headed dog? Harry wrote to me yesterday, and he oh so casually slipped in that Dumbledore was keeping one as a guard-dog."

Lily sighed and rubbed her eyes to chase away the residual sleep. She'd not gotten to it, actually; Pandora had gotten it into her head that she wanted to experiment with an Erumpent Horn that Xenophilius, her husband, had managed to find on his last trip to the continent, and after the last time, Lily had not been willing to leave her unsupervised in her tinkering.

Pandora Lovegood was a woman some two years younger than Lily herself, whom Lily had befriended late in her sixth year of schooling, after the Ravenclaw had been on the receiving end of two Gryffindor boys' harassment. Though the fourth-year had been quite unsettling in the beginning, Lily had found that the girl's love for charms rivalled her own, which had been a sure way of bringing the two together. Pandora's offhand remarks and suggestions were part of the reason why Lily had managed to perfect the Flying Charm, and though they'd only had sporadic contact during the late years of the War and the early post-war period, Lily had still considered her one of her good friends during that time.

Their partnership in spell research had started after Lily's stillbirth and subsequent retirement from the position of the Head of the CMB; it was an accidental development that came out of Xenophilius' absentminded comment on the regulation of charmed objects. Lily's interest had always been far more on the many modern amenities that non-magicals enjoyed, while Pandora's had been on charms found in powerful wizarding artefacts, which allowed both of them enough freedom to not step on each other's toes. At the same time, Lily was able to mitigate the worst of the disasters that came out of Pandora's attempts, while Pandora's usually out-of-the-box suggestions more often than not helped Lily when she got stuck on a problem.

The last major incident that Pandora was involved in had been about a year before, and had nearly ended quite tragically, with Pandora dead at her little girl's feet. Only Lily being there to stop her from completely ignoring any and all safety protocols for work with untested spells and enchanted objects was what had saved the younger woman, and protected Luna from the horrible pain of losing her mother. After it took them almost two hours to calm the near-hysterical nine-year-old, who'd been intelligent enough to understand what could have happened, Pandora had promised not to do anything dangerous without checking with Lily first.

That was, until Xenophilius had brought back the Erumpent Horn; Lily had finally had to bring it to her house for fear of what Pandora might do in her zest for experimentation. One thing, at least, that Lily was grateful for, was Pandora's congenial nature. While put out to have been thwarted, the younger witch was in no way angry with Lily for what she'd done.

"Lily?"

Right; she'd gotten sidetracked.

"It's been a strenuous week," Lily said, shaking her head to chase away the cobwebs. "Sirius, go get some sleep; we'll go see Dumbledore about this after you're a little more rested and a little less caffeinated."

"So you know about the Cerberus," he concluded, narrowing his eyes lightly.

"I know of it, yes. I haven't spoken to the Headmaster about it."

"I'll get Reg," Sirius decided with a nod. "Right, then, shall we say around two?"

"That's fine."

With a pop, the head was gone and the fire returned to its natural colour. Rolling her eyes at the childishness of men – boys will stay boys in some respects, no matter what – she stepped close to her husband and pulled him down for a morning kiss. It took a moment, but Severus finally complied with her demand, and she knew she'd managed to distract him from the event that had just transpired.

It always surprised her anew, just how much she still enjoyed this aspect of their relationship. She'd talked to some of her friends about it, and most of the ones who'd been married for more than ten years said that it had become more of a habit than anything else. Lily and Severus had had their share of dry spells, of course, but the thrill that always went through her when his long fingers wrapped around her hips was still there, as potent as the first time she'd allowed herself to feel it.

"Morning," she whispered once they'd separated, looking at him with happiness.

" _Now_ it is," he agreed, gracing her with one of his rare smiles, the warm, true ones that lit up his eyes and almost transformed his face. "I had assumed you would wish to sleep some more; you had come in rather late last night."

"Sirius woke me up," she grumbled, pouting just a bit at the thought of glorious sleep she clearly wouldn't be getting any time soon. "You truly can't miss an opportunity for trading barbs with him."

The nice thing about being a Charms Master was that she could very easily invent spells like the one they had on their fireplace, that chimed differently depending on which fireplace was trying to connect with them through the Floo network.

"I had hoped that he wouldn't wake you up."

Sev sounded rather cross at that, so she gave him a shrug and a smile.

"Never mind. Tell me about Dumbledore's side project."

"Flamel had received information about a theft attempt; Albus was of the opinion that the Stone would be safer at Hogwarts than at Gringotts while Flamel's out of the country."

"So that's what the break-in was about," Lily concluded with a nod. "I had thought that... no matter. And I assume that your summer project is tied to this?"

"He had thought to ask _Slughorn_ for help," Severus sneered. "I have designed one of the protection layers, though it is not yet fully finished."

"Will it work?"

"As much as Albus' best ideas ever do."

" _Wonderful_ ," Lily said sarcastically. "I cannot believe that he has not informed any of us of this. And, speaking of, why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I had not known that he would put a three-headed dog on top of it," Severus replied, scowl overtaking his face. "He had shown me the other protection layers, but there was no mention of something like that. Everything else is in a rather unreachable part of the dungeons, where no students would accidentally stumble onto it."

"That man is insufferable. Do you know, when Slora had mentioned this, I had rather thought that he was attempting to lure someone into a trap with it."

Severus blinked a few times, then exhaled noisily through his nose and ran his hands through his half-greasy hair.

"I cannot believe I haven't seen this."

"What's that?"

"You are right; the protections he's placed on it, they are all designed to be difficult to overcome, but not impossible by any means. He had specifically asked it of me; mine is a logic puzzle."

"Meaning most of the wizarding world won't be able to figure it out, but at least some will."

"Exactly."

"Then he's trying to trap someone; that has to be the only explanation."

"I'm still reluctant to accept this, Lily," her husband replied. "Albus is many things, but ignorant of the danger that exists to the children is not one of them."

"So why a three-headed dog? Wouldn't have hiding the location of the Stone been a better way of protecting it? Besides, Dumbledore has shown that he allows other things to take priority over his students, you're as aware of this as I am."

Severus pinched the bridge of his nose, discontent written on his face. Lily thought that it might look like exasperation to anyone else.

"I know," he conceded. "But I would rather give Albus the benefit of the doubt than suspect him instantly."

"I know," she echoed his words softly, knowing just how badly learning of Dumbledore's true thoughts on manipulation had hit Severus, ten years ago when they'd managed to break the old man's hold on their world. _Placing Harry with people ignorant of our world isn_ _'_ _t the only way to make the boy understand the preciousness of it, or to make him trust me the way you don't seem to. Those are your thoughts, then? You are no better than Grindelwald or Riddle, Albus, and I am ashamed to be your protégé._ It had broken her heart, hearing those words come out of his mouth and seeing the distinctive way in which he'd pulled that old façade of distance, knowing as she'd known that the pain these words had caused had probably rivalled the one he'd felt when she'd decided not to continue their association back in their fifth year.

Lily's trust in the old headmaster had never been absolute; she'd trusted him as a young girl, yes, before the war had become real and she'd seen Severus' struggle to remain neutral while fulfilling his limited role as a spy and attempting to balance the many secrets he'd had to hide, from their relationship to his true allegiance and Regulus' problems. Dumbledore was, above all, old. People tended to forget that, tended to see his barmy lemon-offering ways, or the power that he could wield, or the position that he held, or maybe the wisdom they thought he possessed. But the fact was that, wizard or Muggle, old people reverted to their childhood personalities; she'd seen it with her grandparents, and she'd seen it with Severus' mother, and she could see it in Dumbledore, as well.

He'd not wanted to become manipulative; not, perhaps, in that purposeful way that had come so easily to Voldemort before his last years. She believed that Dumbledore had gotten side-tracked into it, and perhaps some of the magic he'd come into contact with had eased his transformation into that frame of mind. She'd studied the theoretical aspects of Dark Magic, and she'd even attempted one or two of the spells, after she'd finally acknowledged that having at least _some_ knowledge of the other side's weapons was useful.

Severus claimed that power was addictive, and that power could come from any magic. Lily thought that it wasn't only power that was addictive about the Dark Arts, but rather the proof that they gave to the wielder about this power. Thinking one possessed power was intangible; seeing the power in effect, and especially when fuelled by unhealthy emotions like rage and fury and contempt, was something that one could experience, witness with their own senses, and therein lay their danger. No person was immune to the allure of power, but which power one wielded was a more important question, Severus had often told her. He had found power in admiration that he received for his prowess, for the acknowledgment of his abilities. He'd also found power in his emotions for her and Evan, and this was what had kept him relatively safe from the corrupting influence of the Dark Arts.

Lily herself found power in the satisfaction of a new spell perfectly moulded, in the gratitude of people who'd told her that she'd made the difference in the wizarding world since the War. She also found power in the fierce, untameable love she felt for Severus, and the unbreakable, fulfilling adoration she had for her little boy, and she knew that so long as she never forgot those things, never forgot that they would be judging her, looking to her, holding onto her, she would never allow herself to be corrupted, either.

She didn't think Dumbledore had that. Or, to be more precise, she didn't think that he'd had that for most of his life. His relationship with his brother was beyond strained, his closest friends were not his equals, whether by intellect or by emotion, and what romantic love he'd allowed himself to feel, it had obviously not survived to this time.

Until that night, ten years ago and more, on that snowy Christmas Eve, when two good people lay dead in the rubble and a babe clung sleepily to her robes, Lily didn't think that Dumbledore had known that such a connection in his life did, actually, exist.

Something had broken in the old man that night, at those words said seemingly without inflection, yet holding so much emotion that she'd choked up on them, had had to bury her head in Harry's soft baby curls and reach almost blindly for Sev's hand, because she'd not had the strength to face the enormity of his pain, and yet had not the strength to face away from it, either. That moment, that break, that split, that shatter of trust, that had been the moment when Dumbledore had seen, like Lily had seen the first time Severus had pulled away from her instead of the other way around, all those years ago, seen as clearly as anything could be seen, that losing the connection to this one other person was not to be borne.

And as so many before and after him knew and would know, as she thought that Severus had known, when Dumbledore had presented him with the choice between Lily and Voldemort, the old headmaster had known that he would do anything to preserve that bond, even if it meant laying all his secrets and thoughts bare.

She sometimes shuddered to think what Dumbledore would have been like without the bond that existed between him and Severus. A cold man, no doubt, and a weary one, who probably believed that the greater good had to come first at all costs, who would make tough choices no matter how much they pained him, and who would hold everything close to the vest because even a little loss of control would have frightened him witless.

Dumbledore had lived through that fear, though, when he'd subjected himself to Severus' Legilimency, and he'd not only seen preserved that for which he'd yearned the most, but had also seen the greater good fulfilled and their world bettered. And old or not, even Dumbledore had seemed to her able to learn from this experience enough to let people in.

There was one thing, however, and she doubted that anyone but Severus had noticed it – Dumbledore had changed his wand ten years ago. Oh, it was a very close replacement, certainly, but the colour had been off, Severus had said, and it had been a little shorter, a little slenderer. Lily had never breathed a word of this to another soul, but she'd spent a considerable amount of time researching it, until the possibility that had become the most likely one had frightened her enough to let it go.

Whether Dumbledore's old wand had _truly_ been what she believed it had been, for once the red-haired witch was gladder not to know; ultimately it mattered little in the grand scheme of things, how much the old wand could have been influencing Dumbledore's actions, because he'd made a conscious decision, a choice to change his ways, and that was what counted.

That first sting of betrayal, that had almost eaten Sev alive that night and many days after, it still stayed with Lily, however. That was probably that pettiness that she shared with Petunia and her mother coming out, and for once she didn't feel like fighting against it. So no, she still didn't trust Dumbledore half as much as Severus seemed to, even after everything, but she was willing to concede that after a hundred and ten years, that kookiness that Dumbledore often showed might have become somewhat more substantial – at least substantial enough that it explained away the idea behind placing a dangerous magical being within reach of children.

So she would give him the benefit of the doubt, and hear his explanation. And then she would confer with Regulus and decide what the best course of action would be.

* * *

 _Dear Harry,_

 _Really, have I never taught you anything? It's 'Marauder', not 'Marader'. Really, Prongslet, of all the words in that letter... Oh, Moony insists that I also correct 'Extraordinair', which should be spelled 'Extraordinaire', but I think you don't need to know that, since it's French and you know what I think about the French._

 _A deal's a deal, but as I understand, you've not yet been to the try-outs, so let's hold out on that Nimbus 2000 until it's official, what do you say? Just in case there's still room for me to laugh at your pouting face if you don't get in; I admit that you're not the first person I'd laugh at for thinking they'd gotten away with something prematurely, but it'll definitely be the sweetest laugh... except for the one I had on your father when you ended up needing glasses._

 _Joking aside, congrats for managing this in your first month at Hogwarts, and I'm sure that as proud as I am of you, your father and mother are even more so. Remus, too, though I have to warn you that he was considering sending you a Howler after he heard what you pulled off. I think I've managed to dissuade him from it, but you never know with Remus, he tends to get a little unpredictable during that time of the month._

 _There's no way that Filch would have thrown the Map away; he doesn't throw anything away, ever. So if someone's nicked it, you can't really know when that happened in the last thirteen years, sorry, sport, but I suppose you might try to ask around. Who's the best gossip in the Tower? Maybe they can help you out? After all, anyone worthy of the Marauders' legacy would definitely know how to use it, and Remus says that he built in some safety mechanisms to prevent it from being destroyed easily, so there's at least some chance of finding it._

 _Look on it as a mission, like in our Auror practice, and I have no doubt at all that you'll find it._

 _What's this about a three-headed dog? The old man seems to get kookier and kookier by the year, doesn't he? Did you run into the dog? I certainly hope not; I would hate to hear that my beloved godson got eaten by a Cerberus._

 _I will see you during your first Quidditch match, should you make the team._

 _Until then, I'm eagerly waiting to hear more about the exploits of the Junior Marauders. The first prank sounded like quite a winner._

 _Your awesome Godfather,_

 _Sirius_

* * *

"A Cerberus."

"That is correct."

"A Cerberus."

"Are you deadpanning again, brother dear?"

"Just thought it should be mentioned twice," Sirius answered his brother's clearly rhetorical question, arms crossed over his chest. He, Regulus, Lily and Snape stood in front of the old Hogwarts Headmaster, who was currently seated behind his desk and looking at them with those maddeningly twinkling eyes, fingers entwined on the desk before him. "Most insane ideas around here seem to be."

"What is your thinking, Albus?" Lily asked, clearly somewhat calmer than him, but not nearly as calm as she was attempting to appear. Sirius, having spent seven years in close proximity to the woman during their school years, and continuing their friendship for the following thirteen, knew that the most dangerous Lily Evans was the Lily Evans who appeared quite unfazed by the problem at hand.

"There is an extremely valuable object safeguarded in the school at this moment in time," Dumbledore answered, clearly either not knowing Lily well enough to see the warning signs, or just thinking too highly of himself to find it a concern of any sort. Sirius hoped it was the first. "Hagrid's Cerberus is but a first of several protections guarding this object."

"And _why_ , if you feel it so essential to the protection of that damned Stone," Lily asked, " _why_ haven't you devised a proper way of keeping snooping eleven-year-old children from reaching it? Putting aside the facts that you've brought a level four beast into a _school_ , with _children_ , and that you've done so _without consulting either of the governing bodies_?"

The twinkle diminished, and Dumbledore leaned lightly forward in his seat.

"You are claiming that a student has been able to reach the Cerberus?"

"No, she just likes to invent children who like to sniff around forbidden places. Yes, of course, that's exactly what she's saying," Sirius said, exasperated beyond belief. "Harry wrote to me two days ago, asking after that damned thing."

"Has he stated that he has seen it?"

"Does it matter?" Snape cut in. "While I am honestly shocked that you'd even ask this question, knowing his likeness to his father, even if he personally hasn't seen it, some student has to have for him to know of it."

"The only other option is Hagrid," Regulus suggested, sounding quite dismissive of his own idea. "I am inclined to believe that Harry would find the half-giant somewhat dull."

"So far as I know, he's not had contact with Hagrid since we ran into him this summer at the Diagon Alley. When he with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer went to pick up said damned Stone," Sirius agreed. "Honestly, Albus, couldn't you have sent someone a little less prone to declaring to all the world what your business is?"

"Are you deliberately making it obvious that you have the Stone in your possession?" Lily asked, cutting with her usual bluntness through the crap surrounding this meeting. Dumbledore inclined his head to her, though he didn't look in the least upset by her question.

"Nicolas has had quite a few problems concerning the Philosopher's Stone's safety recently; we are convinced that these attempts during the last several years have been perpetrated by the same offender."

"Someone obviously competent enough to break into Gringotts, but still stupid enough to not notice the thing's already left the building," Sirius concluded. "Sounds like any Ravenclaw to me."

"The world is not divided by the fraternities one school promotes," Regulus answered coolly. "That said, I agree with Sirius that this person seems relatively well-versed in tackling stationary problems, while seemingly incompetent when it comes to sudden changes of the playing field."

"Perenelle has insisted that this problem be dealt with promptly, and Nicolas is unfortunately quite occupied out of the country for the foreseeable future," Dumbledore continued as if the two brothers hadn't interrupted him. "Our idea, therefore, was as you've deduced, Lily, that we make the Stone's location an obvious, but a very difficult to reach one. Sirius, Regulus, you are both correct; this is our assessment of the attempted thief, as well. To this end, measures of protection have been devised that would demand of the thief to invest a considerable amount of time and effort to solving them."

"So your idea is to catch him red-handed," Snape concluded, voice sounding thoughtful. "Preferably by getting him stuck mid-way. And, just in case he hasn't realised that the Stone is in Hogwarts, you've placed a Cerberus on top of all the other protections, so that it may howl out its location."

"I had rather hoped that no student would be able to reach it," Dumbledore stated in a regretful way that set Sirius' teeth on edge. "Unfortunately, the location of the other protections dictated which part of the castle would be used; the Charms classroom has been relocated for this schooling year one floor directly above, so that the Charms corridor, and with it the corridor leading to the protections, could be properly sealed off. The only explanation is that I have missed a hidden passageway."

Sirius snorted, knowing instantly which part of the castle Dumbledore was describing. "Of course you missed one; there's a very narrow stairwell behind the statue of Miserable Griselda that leads from the ground floor to exactly that corridor."

"Ah; I had not known about that one. This shall be rectified immediately."

"Couldn't you just remove the damned dog? Or, I don't know, place it on the same level as all the other things?" Sirius suggested.

"The other protections are five floors below," Snape said. "I would much rather that the children learn of it by hearing it behind closed doors than by landing on it after dropping seventy feet through the air."

"I would much rather that it be removed completely," Regulus stated. "Not only has a very dangerous beast been brought into the school without prior approval of either the Board or the Council, it has been so for private purposes of the school's most senior administrator. Hogwarts is not your personal vault, Headmaster. It is one of the safest places in Britain, yes, but it has been so designed to protect students, not ancient constructs that grant unimaginable advantages to two people."

"The Cerberus cannot be removed while the majority of the student body resides in the school," Dumbledore said, stopping the discussion in its tracks. "Even with Hagrid's method of controlling it, the Cerberus is too large and dangerous to be moved through the school while in reach of children."

"And it's a creature that is immune to magic," Lily concluded, clearly displeased by the situation but seeing, as Sirius did, that there wasn't much to be done at this point. "Very well; the Cerberus will have to remain where it is until it is safe to move it, but I want it moved as soon as it is possible. And place some damned wards on the corridor leading up to it, for Merlin's sake, something that will deter the lower years from reaching it if they do get to the corridor like Harry clearly had."

"It would be best if we inspected the current wards in our official capacities as representatives of Hogwarts' governing bodies," Regulus said, his suggestion receiving a nod from Lily. "And I fully agree with her; Harry would never have been able to reach the Cerberus if the whole corridor had been warded, rather than just the entrances."

"Very well," Dumbledore agreed. "As soon as we are done here, I will personally escort you to the cordoned area; if you feel that any more precautionary measures are necessary, those will be implemented as well. I do not wish to see children harmed any more than you do."

"How likely is it that the thief would attack a student if someone noticed him snooping about?" Regulus asked, from his voice obvious to Sirius that he'd just been waiting for the segue to open that point of the discussion.

"Probably not very," Sirius answered, drawing on his decade-long experience as an Auror. "Attacking a student is a guaranteed way of getting into AO's sights, and judging from the technique used to break into Gringotts, this is a person whose whole _modus operandi_ revolves around being unseen and unsuspected. There is not a single person who could tell us what the perpetrator looked like, simply because no one remembers seeing anything suspicious until the next day, when another vault-holder had them driving past the vault and noticing that the protective magic was down."

"Does that mean the person was powerful enough to break goblin magic?" Lily asked.

"Not necessarily; just smart enough. The one thing that goblins rarely insure their vaults against are other goblins, simply because there are so few who live outside of their community. The general consensus at the headquarters is that the thief either had magical artefacts that mimicked a goblin's magical signature, or else had a goblin helping them. Since nothing was taken, they wouldn't let us conduct further inquiries, but I imagine that if it was someone internally, they're long since dead."

"So, your investigation is dead either way."

"Pretty much," Sirius confirmed. "If it was a wizarding bank, it would have been another story, but DMLE simply has no jurisdiction over Gringotts, and the goblins' own internal policing agency isn't cooperative in the least. In any case, to answer your question, Reg, from what I know of this guy, I'd say that he'd try his hardest not to get caught by children, and even if he does get caught snooping around, that he'd either have a plausible excuse for it, or else that he'd make sure not to severely injure the student."

"That's of little comfort," Regulus noted.

"So what are you going to do, Reg?" Sirius asked him, leaning lightly in his seat. Despite what the obvious answer was – tell Dumbledore to take his own personal business outside of the school – Sirius knew his brother well enough to see that this wasn't going to happen.

"Nicolas Flamel has donated a considerable amount of money to the school in the last decade," Regulus answered. "This presents quite an obstacle."

"Call it as it is, Regulus," Lily cut him off in a clipped tone. "If not for Flamel's money, the school would look just the same as it did during our years. I know that was your doing, Albus, and I am very grateful to the man, but I resent that he – and you – think it entitles him to using Hogwarts as his personal vault."

"Well, it clearly does, or else you would have put a stop to this scheme," Sirius noted with a light snort. "Now who's not calling it as it is?"

"Fine," the woman retorted through clenched teeth. "Clearly it entitles him, because Regulus won't do anything about it."

"All that I _can_ do is gather the Board of Governors for a vote," Regulus said mildly. "I hold no more power than you do, Lily. Unfortunately, I believe that there is a fair number of wizards who would not think this in any way unacceptable; so long as the danger is not obvious, the wizarding inhabitants of Britain have clearly shown that they would rather ignore the threat altogether."

"I assure you, Regulus, Lily," Dumbledore spoke, and the other four fell silent, "that all possible measures will be taken to protect the children from this."

"Until they aren't," Snape commented, having kept his silence for this long. His black eyes were inscrutable to Sirius, though he did seem to be staring at the Headmaster rather intensely. "Be careful, Albus; this is a powder-keg of a situation, and all that's needed is a spark."

The old man returned Snape's gaze with a calm look of his own, not revealing anything further. With a sigh, Lily stood up out of her chair.

"Let us see to the wards, then. And Albus? The next time I hear about you keeping something of this importance from the Board and the Council, I _will_ take measures."

And, in spite of all his instincts screaming to the contrary, Sirius found himself impressed with the elegance of the outermost protections. The two main entrances to the corridor were covered with a modified Notice-Me-Not Charm that almost caused him to smack into a wall a few times, because he kept missing the archway, and once they successfully worked around that, Snape made a wide semicircle and came back out, looking momentarily surprised – it seemed that another of the more blatant charms was the Direction Confusing Charm, which had caused the man to think he'd been walking forward when he hadn't.

The less noticeable were the actual wards, which measured magical cores to judge the wizard or witch interacting with them, which meant that all children whose magical cores were not fully developed couldn't pass them, even if it meant that they'd be bounced off. For the upper years, Albus had overlaid wards that judged intent, such as those that Sirius knew were placed in certain spots in their Ministry. Though in theory not very applicable, in practice, if the caster knew their business, they could be fine-tuned to the point of proper thought wording, and the discipline needed for one's control of their mind to fool the wards was most likely not something any student could do.

"I could not simply place a barrier, as the Cerberus needs to be fed, and Hagrid is not well-versed in unlocking wards to pass through them," Albus explained. "The conditions and limitation placed on his allowance of magic use do not permit me to teach him anything of the sort."

The pointlessness of the law that required wizards be forbidden from the use of wands and/or magic in cases of expulsion from Hogwarts had been one of those things Minister Bagnold had tackled during her years in the position. Given that most witches and wizards whose wands were broken by the Ministry as per the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery (wand-breaking being the standard way of enforcing it on underage witches and wizards who were disallowed from finishing their studies in Magical Britain) simply chose to buy new wands and finish their education on the continent before returning with the Ministry being none the wiser, the very existence of such laws without proper regulation and enforcement was completely moot. Moreover, enforcing the law effectively was quite impossible in the first place, as it was illegal to track a person's magic after the expiration of the Trace unless they were criminal offenders, and simply getting expelled from magical schools did not qualify as a criminal offence in itself. Considering that a disturbingly high number of such people had ended up siding with Voldemort in the war, Bagnold had thought it better to amend the law.

Now, it firstly forbade any sale of wands to overage wizards officially sentenced to wand breaking for a set amount of time depending on the transgression that had earned them this punishment, with the list of such people distributed to all licenced wandmakers, and secondly, it required the submission of the record of their magical competency (usually in the form of a magical school's diploma or passed M.A.R.G.A.Y.s, the Magical Aptitude Review for Groundwork-Averted in Youth) before applying to have their name removed from the list. The catch twenty-two was later corrected by allowing people with incomplete magical education to train under licenced instructors with so-called 'training wands', which contained strenuous limitations with regards to the magic they allowed to be performed with them.

Under said law amendments, Hagrid had finally been allowed to complete his training, with his Hogwarts colleagues donating their time as his instructors. In Hagrid's case, however, though he'd taken and passed the exams, the original reason for his expulsion (which Sirius knew from the official files to be the smuggling of highly regulated magical creatures into Hogwarts) still forbade him from performing an array of spells, including warding spells.

"What is necessary for unfettered access to the corridor?" Regulus asked.

"Adult magical core and the intention of inspecting the obstacles without disturbing them. Additionally, one must be aware of all the obstacles placed within the confines of the wards; Minerva and Severus are the only ones aside from me who have that information. Hagrid is the only exception to this, as the Cerberus is under his care. However, he cannot lead anyone else in who does not fulfil the requirements of the wards, and I trust him implicitly with this matter. He is not the thief."

"I can't imagine him being," Lily agreed.

"Not least because he was the one who brought the Stone to Hogwarts from Gringotts, and he could have easily stolen it then, instead of now," Sirius agreed.

"Are you satisfied in your official capacity, then, Lily, Regulus?" Dumbledore asked them.

"I am," Regulus confirmed. "Place some wards in the corridor, as well, and close the passage Harry had discovered. Sirius, is there any other passage that you know about that would lead to this area?"

"No. I obviously never discovered every single hidden passageway, so there is always a possibility of another one being open. I doubt it, though; usually they're evenly spaced and we could predict a lot of them in our later years. There shouldn't be any other."

"Very well, then. Headmaster, we will take our leave. You will, of course, inform us with regards to any changes on this matter."

It was not a request, and Dumbledore seemed to know it. Remembering all the insane shenanigans that had gone on during his time at Hogwarts, Sirius found it a little difficult to ever imagine Dumbledore bowing to the will of the supervisory bodies in this way. Yet, from all that he'd heard on the subject, the old wizard truly was holding to his end of the bargain in that respect; it was most likely why Regulus wasn't insisting on any more drastic measures. Albus had earned himself a lot of leeway, and was obviously choosing to use it now, for one reason or another.

Returning to his office, the four wizards Flooed out, and the last thing Sirius saw from the fireplace was a thoughtful look on the face of the most powerful wizard in Britain and wider. It didn't give him all that much confidence, not with the thought in the back of his mind that the man's biggest scheme had resulted in the death of Sirius' best friend.

* * *

Regulus accepted his brother's offer of Firewhisky gratefully once they were in his snug little three-floor house, feeling drained and very dissatisfied. He _hated_ talking to Dumbledore about school business, absolutely detested it. To be truthful, he near-enough detested the man himself; Dumbledore had lost most of Regulus' respect many, many years ago, and what had survived his schooling years had turned to dust that night they'd all confronted him about his failings, deliberate or accidental.

When eighteen-year-old Regulus Black had come to the shattering realisation of _what_ he'd pledged his allegiance to, his whole life to, there had been no one to turn to. He'd had Kreacher, yes, but precious little others. Sirius had abandoned him when he was eleven, his mother had been as insane as Voldemort, his father just buried, not that he would have been inclined to help in any way, and the only other family who had been in any way approachable had been Andromeda, who'd not had anything to do with the war. And, there had been Dahlia to consider, Dahlia and his feelings for her, the quickened heartbeat at her smile, the warmth suffusing his limbs at her presence, the ache at being separated from her. The thought of telling her his realisation at the lengths of the mad man's perversion, it had left him cold and bereft.

He wouldn't have told anyone anything after Voldemort had forced him to sacrifice Kreacher to his insane demands, only Regulus' carefully worded orders saving the little elf's life, had he not seen the flash of disgust on Severus' face one time when he'd escorted him after the older boy had finished his business with the monster.

Even then, nineteen years old, Severus Snape had been quite well-known in the Dark Lord's circles, the one who'd had the balls to tell the Dark Lord that he wouldn't mind selling his services, but that he had absolutely no interest in any sort of a political struggle and would, therefore, not be joining any side. How the man had pulled that off, Regulus to this day didn't know, but for some reason Voldemort had been pacified enough to be willing to buy from Severus what he could have gotten for free from any other loyal potion's master, even if the quality would have been much lower. And Severus hadn't even been a master of the art yet, though he'd shot through the apprenticeship faster than anyone else in Britain had in the past three hundred years.

And that flash of disgust on his face, that Regulus had half-convinced himself he'd only imagined, had been enough for him to reach out to his once-maybe-friend, before Severus had become more interested in his personal dealings than even the Marauders, before Regulus had become completely obsessed with joining the Death Eater ranks.

Severus had been the one to place him on Dumbledore's path, and no matter how much he disliked the old wizard, Regulus couldn't begrudge Severus for it. He'd seen, from the start, that Albus Dumbledore and Lily Evans were the only things keeping Severus' head above water, and despite his mistrust of the Headmaster, Regulus had been desperate enough at that point that he'd agreed to become a spy in exchange for a guilt-free life afterwards. And, if nothing else, then choosing to reach out to the Light instead of trying to solve the mystery himself was what had saved his life.

And there was a lot of truth to the fact that Dumbledore wasn't the man he'd been twenty years ago; his hushed dislike for Slytherins had waned, his benevolent Machiavelli persona that Regulus had always seen had given way to a resignation of the passage of time, and his priorities seemed to have reoriented themselves towards actually running the magical school.

Yet here they were again, with Dumbledore implementing some hare-brained scheme in a school full of children, as if the school belonged to him.

"What do you think of all this, Reg?" Siri asked him after long minutes of silence.

"I think the man's up to his old tricks."

Sirius snorted into his glass of firewhisky before draining it. "When is he not? He wouldn't be Dumbledore without them. Seriously, though?"

"I think there is more to this," Regulus stated honestly. His brother's days of blind loyalty to the old man had passed that night when Severus had revealed that Dumbedore's plans for little Harry hadn't particularly involved Sirius' input.

"You are too paranoid sometimes, Reggie," Sirius said, eyes at half-mast. He'd not slept last night; his thinking was always sluggish when he hadn't had enough sleep, though he'd become much better since becoming an Auror.

"You are not paranoid enough, Siri," he informed his brother calmly.

"That's not any way to live, Regulus; it'll sap at you until there's nothing left."

"It's kept me alive this long."

"Sometimes I wish..."

But he didn't say what it was that he wished for; Regulus had learned to brace himself when his brother ended up in one of these melancholy moods, and have Dahlia prepare a Sobering Draught for him afterwards. Regulus could handle his drink, but his brother would drink him under the table if he truly wished.

Gaining Sirius back, and a Sirius that was not a rebellious, stupidly stubborn child, but a man jaded by the loss of the person he'd replaced Regulus with, a man with a responsibility in the form of a child entrusted to him and nearly taken away by his own stupidity, it was more than Regulus had ever hoped for. Sirius was insensitive and brash, he spoke before he thought and he allowed prejudices to rule his life even as he railed against them, but Regulus had accepted anything he could have had, back when he'd had to juggle his father's death, his crazy mother, his pregnant new wife, the accusations of allegiance to Voldemort and his position as the new head of one of the oldest wizarding families.

No, Sirius the Man wasn't that Sirius the Boy who'd mocked Regulus for his house and sneered at his peace-keeping attempts, who'd left him in that house with that mother of theirs and told him the day he learned that Regulus had taken the Mark that he was dead to him. He was changed, no matter how much he liked to pretend that he was still a Marauder in the same measure he'd once been.

The dark shadows under his eyes and the sloop to his shoulders attested to that.

And now he'd fallen into that brooding mood of his, and Regulus didn't want to follow him there, though he knew that he'd have to. Someone had to pull the idiot out in the end, and there was no one but him and Remus Lupin, not in Sirius' life, not really.

And Harry; always Harry.

"Sometimes I wish, as well," he answered after an indeterminate amount of time, and they fell into silence again, as Regulus released that tight hold he had over a world of resentment he'd ever held towards his older brother. An old exercise, and a futile one, but it was necessary if he wished to keep things between them good, and that he did.

It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and Regulus had much left to do in the day; and Sirius needed sleep, proper sleep, not the wink he'd gotten during the morning. When his brother reached for the bottle again, Regulus banished it back to the cabinet and stood up.

"You need to get some rest, Brother. Come."

"You are _not_ tucking me into bed, Reggie," Sirius complained, but he did rise to his feet and the two of them set of for the upper floor and Sirius' bedroom. "What will you do about this, then?"

"Nothing; some battles would only be a Pyrrhic victory, and this seems like one of those. I will make certain that no other child can stumble upon the beast, and let the Headmaster play his game of cat and mouse. And _you_... you'll have someone keep an eye out on the comings and goings at Hogwarts."

Sirius gave him a feral grin as they entered his room – red, of course. Regulus barely contained the urge to roll his eyes. Some things never did change.

"There are a few trainees who need some lessons in manners."

Regulus shook his head lightly at his brother's antics, but he had to admit that he was glad Sirius' good mood had recovered. If there was one thing that Sirius couldn't stand, it was being idle; giving him a task like this was just the thing he needed.

Regulus left his brother's home and Apparated silently to the square in front of Grimmauld Place, the house that was rarely visible to any but those he wished to see it. Dahlia was in their library, as was usual for her, pouring over some old book or other.

"Husband," she greeted him, lifting her head up lightly so that he could place a gentle kiss on her lips.

"Wife," he whispered back, digging his fingers into her chocolate curls to satisfy that age-old need to have her so close she'd become a part of him.

"Where is Alya?"

"Shopping with Kreacher. She is in search of a perfect Hallowe'en ensemble. You know how that worrywart gets; he won't let her come back without one."

Regulus smiled lightly at his daughter's antics. And at the fact that the house would be empty but for the two of them for the foreseeable future.

Dahlia was on her feet before the thought finished crossing his mind.

An hour later, she lifted her head from his shoulder and studied him with shrewd pale blue eyes.

"How did the meeting go?"

"Surprisingly typical. There _is_ a Cerberus at Hogwarts, and it is a trap waiting to be sprung on a careless thief. To say that Lily and Sirius were displeased would be an understatement. Dumbledore has certainly outdone himself this time."

"What thief?"

Regulus looked at her, catching the sharpening of her tone.

"The one who broke into Gringotts last month. Most unfortunately for them, the loot had been moved hours before they'd done so."

"And now it's in Hogwarts, with seven hundred children."

"Exactly."

"This is part of something bigger." She inhaled sharply, pulling up enough to be able to look at him fully, hair spilling over her naked back. "You do not think it has to do with the Dark Lord?"

Regulus barely constrained the instinctive move of his hand towards his left forearm. The Mark had remained silent for ten years and more, but never fainter than it had been the day after the Dark Lord's fall.

"I would not be surprised, Dahl," he replied softly, shifting himself to his side and propping his head up with his arm. Dahlia's hands moved to cover the Dark Mark on his other arm and trace it delicately with her fingers, as if her love could erase the ugliness of it. It always made him love her more. "The object hidden at Hogwarts, yet guarded so obviously as to not be hidden at all. An object he would want desperately, if he is yet sentient."

"But even Dumbledore isn't insane enough to lure _him_ to the school," she answered.

"No, but I believe that you are right; this is about more than just helping an old friend."

"Hogwarts was always dangerous," she pointed out. "And it has always been a power point. You should bring up strengthening the wards of the school at the next Board meeting."

"If this is tied to the Dark Lord, then absolutely."

"Good," she said, giving him a light smile before scooting gracefully to the edge of the bed and giving him a perfect view of her lithe body. "There is a problem with one of the estate holdings that you need to look into. The numbers do not match."

"Dahl," he called once she'd donned her silk housecoat. She turned to him, and he took a moment to drink her in, her gorgeous dark curls, her delicate cheekbones and the cupid's arch of her lip, her pale blue eyes. "I love you."

"And I, you, Regulus, very much."

And when Alya did come back, talking more animatedly than they'd ever seen her about the two girls she'd spent the better part of the day with in Diagon Alley, Regulus smiled a genuine smile and thanked Merlin and Salazar too that he'd had the ability to trust enough to let others pull him out of the jaws of death.

* * *

 **A/N:** Looking into various tests, I was surprised to find that they have strong analogies to Hogwarts house animal mascots - OWLs are birds like Eagles; NEWTs are amphibians, which is not that distant from reptiles like Snakes; and there are also WOMBATs, which are visually evocative of Badgers. So I chose to set these new ones in that vein (margays are a cat species), since Lions were the only ones not represented that I could find. Coming up with the full name for them to fit the acronym was a bit of a struggle, and I'm not quite sure I'm happy with it, but for now it works.


	11. Ch 10: The Hobbies of Magical Schoolers

**Chapter 10: The Hobbies of Magical Schoolers  
**

When Hermione had first learned that she was a witch, she'd naturally bought herself plenty of historical books to acquaint herself with the world she would be stepping into. She'd very quickly figured out that the fact her parents weren't magical separated her from most other witches and wizards; she'd also managed to read between the lines enough to learn that Slytherin House did not, as a generalisation, appreciate Muggle-borns.

Therefore, if someone had told her in April that two months into the school year, she'd be best friends with a Slytherin boy, and be acquainted with two other students of the same House who didn't seem too perturbed by her heritage, she would have considered it highly unlikely. Yet that seemed to be turning out to be exactly the case.

Evan was a kindred spirit in those things that mattered the most to Hermione: he was studious, meticulous and hard-working. He'd been somewhat hesitant at the beginning of their association, but after a week of meeting in the library and finding more and more common topics of conversation, he'd gradually relaxed, like a little hedgehog slowly unfurling from its defensive ball, until a week later, the greasy-haired boy had laughed with her, a strange entertaining sort of sniggering laugh that, when truly provoked, became completely inaudible.

Hermione had never met anyone who laughed without a sound; had, in fact, not really though it possible, until she'd seen Evan do it.

After that, he'd become much more at ease with her, and Hermione had found herself greatly enjoying his company. Unlike all the other kids around her, he didn't seem to mind when she went on and on about something or other she'd read, and he was also quite willing to tolerate her strenuous studying schedule. Hermione didn't like studying with others, because they couldn't keep up with her, but she did like to debate on what she was studying, and having Evan as a study partner was already proving to be not only practical, but very fun (even if he whinged like a five-year-old about most everything that didn't come to him as naturally as potions and how Harry-bloody-Potterprat seemed to be spending zero time studying and still pulling praiseworthy grades – Hermione had finally snapped at him for it after about six weeks and pointed out, sharply, that he should be thankful potions _did_ come that easily to him, because they bloody didn't to almost anyone else, and that while Harry Potter was on the surface natural at everything, he was still behind either her, Evan or a few other students in all classes but Transfiguration. He'd shut up after that... for a while, at least).

It had, however, taken them some time to figure out how to function in a non-studious setting. The problem, of course, was that Hermione had an opinion on everything people, including Evan, did, and she had a tendency to tell them exactly that. He'd termed that her 'bossy attitude' and had very little patience for it. On his side, Evan was a prickly sort of person, easy to get along with if he didn't feel attacked or provoked, but when his temper was raised, he could be cutting and very hurtful. He was also probably the most stubborn person Hermione had ever met, which tended to leave them both frustrated if he believed his view in the discussion as superior to hers and refused to change it.

Their first big fight had taken place the second weekend of September, and had been about Harry Potter and his friends. Evan had a very strong dislike for the boys, and after they'd tried to rough him up on Friday, his mood on Saturday had been stormy to say the least. Hermione hadn't quite noticed it in time, and her disapproving remarks about the stupid prank had escalated, via Evan's muttered promises of retribution for what the four boys had done to him (though Hermione had gathered that he hadn't been actually hurt, just sort of ambushed), into an epic argument, as she'd tried to convince him that he shouldn't do it and he'd hissed at her that she was taking their side when that hadn't been true at all.

The fight had ended with him closing it out by telling her that 'it was no wonder no one liked her, when all that came out of her mouth was her nastiness about things she was sticking her nose into unasked' and her replying, through tears, that 'at least she wasn't so socially stunted as to not know when people were looking out for her, even if they told her things she didn't want to hear'. He'd stormed off after that, and she'd gathered her things and spent the day, miserable, in one of the Ravenclaw Tower study rooms.

Putting the fight aside, what Hermione had told Evan that day was the truth; when he wasn't annoyed with her bossy comments, Evan had plenty of suggestions regarding the way she said those comments to others. He had also very quickly gotten in the habit of teaching her how to think more like a Slytherin. His suggestions weren't exactly things that she considered correct – they were often turned towards taking unfair advantage of a situation, or purposefully keeping things from others when she would have freely shared them – but if nothing else, then she was willing to follow his advice when it came to all the knowledge he shared with her on the topic of potion making, because she felt that it was entrusted to her by a friend, and that it would be disloyal (two weeks, and she'd shot right up to the top of her Hufflepuff-Ravenclaw class).

Evan had apologised for yelling at her the very next day, but the tension hadn't really left their interactions for that week, because Hermione had not given up on dissuading him from getting even with Potter and his group, and Evan had been quite set in his mind on that particular point.

The day she'd known that he was truly her friend had been on that Friday; September 19th, her twelfth birthday, had come without much fanfare from any of her classmates or tentative friends, and where she'd expected one owl from her parents with her birthday present, there had flown a second one towards her, a brown school one, with a simple modern envelope. Surprised, she'd untied it from the owl's leg and studied the handwriting of her name on the front of the envelope, long and narrow, with the loops of the letters somewhat squished. Evan's handwriting.

There had been a short letter in the envelope, along with five small pieces of parchment. She'd pulled out the letter with a frown, wondering what this was about and how in the world he'd known it was her birthday. She'd certainly never told him.

 _Dear Hermione,_

 _Happy birthday! I_ _'_ _m sorry that I couldn_ _'_ _t get you anything better, but I only managed to ask Professor Flitwick about the date yesterday, and so I didn_ _'_ _t really have time for a more appropriate gift. In this envelope are five slips labelled_ _'_ _defer_ _'_ _; my mum gives me six each year, and I can use them if I feel like she isn_ _'_ _t listening to me or that my side of the situation should be honoured when she would otherwise pull the_ _'_ _adult_ _'_ _card and do it her way. I made you five, because the sixth one I_ _'_ _ve exchanged for my promise that I won_ _'_ _t do anything to Potterprat and his gang for attacking me. You_ _'_ _re probably the closest friend I have of all our classmates, and I dislike being at odds with you, so this is my attempt at a peace negotiation. I hope you don_ _'_ _t mind that it_ _'_ _s also a birthday present._

 _Evan_

She'd carefully packed the letter back into the envelope and searched out Evan's sallow face at the adjacent table, giving him a wide smile when she'd seen that his green eyes were studying her intently through his curtain of hair. He'd seemed to relax in his seat at that, and the girl next to him had said something that had made him glare at her quite intently for a moment. Not giving it much thought, Hermione had pulled out one of the little notes and studied the handwriting carefully, feeling like she'd finally found her place in world.

The girl who'd spoken to Evan that day was a mousy-looking Slytherin firstie whose name turned out to be Tracey Davis. Hermione had gotten to meet her the very next day, when the girl had slid tonelessly into an empty seat at Evan's and Hermione's usual library table. Evan, after introducing them, had explained that he and Tracey had standing study sessions in Potions and Charms, and since he and Hermione were meeting that day to study Charms, he'd thought they could all do it together.

Tracey had studied Hermione with shrewd grey eyes and after a moment had nodded lightly.

"So, you're Snape's Ravenclaw know-it-all friend." Hermione had clenched her teeth at that, and the girl had given her a light smile. "It annoys you; Snape, you should teach her how to control her face better."

The boy had shrugged. "Sure, if she's interested."

"Interested in what?" Hermione couldn't help but ask.

"I can teach you some basic Occlumency, if you want. It's a mind magic of a sort. My dad's been teaching me." Hermione had given him an unimpressed glare, and he'd continued. "I can read your mind on your face, is all, and some people would–"

"Find a way to use it," she'd finished his sentence for him; he'd told her that often enough. "You're not much better, you know. You think you are, but I can read you like a book."

He'd fallen stormy almost instantly. "Well, I'm sure better than you are."

"You know, you should embrace the moniker," Tracey had then told Hermione, cutting them off, clearly having recognised that Evan's hackles had been raised, never a pleasant promise of things to come. "If you make it your own, then no one can use it against you anymore. And, you really _are_ a know-it-all."

"But that's not how I want people to see me!" had burst out before she could censure herself. In response the girl had shrugged.

"Too late for that, now. Besides, what's it matter? When you know all, then you can gain all."

Hermione had blinked in startlement at the Slytherin girl, who'd returned the look with a curious one of her own (and she really _did_ look sort of like a little field mouse, with her button nose and her sandy brown hair, had gone through Hermione's head).

"I haven't thought of it that way," she'd allowed in the end, scrunching her nose at the whole thing. "So, you're good in Charms?"

"Oh, yes, it's my favourite subject," Tracey had enthused, and the girl had begun sporadically joining them after that day in their studying sessions. She was a strange blend of quiet and scathing in turns, mostly depending on how her temper was provoked, and she had to be the one person Hermione had met so far who disliked Gryffindors with a passion really disproportionate to even the famed Gryffindor-Slytherin rivalry. Evan had only shrugged when Hermione had asked him about it, and she had by then learned enough of the girl to know that asking her was bound to end with Hermione crying or screaming at Tracey, so the question went unanswered.

Theodore Nott was the other Slytherin Hermione had gotten the chance to meet, and he seemed far more bothered by the fact that she was Muggle-born than Tracey ever was. He was more reserved than the girl by far, and of course, he never said anything about Hermione's heritage, but some of the looks that he sent her way when he thought she wasn't paying attention made her bristle up inside.

Evan seemed to like him far better than the other Slytherin boys, for which Hermione couldn't blame him. Malfoy and his cronies were loathsome, and Blaise Zabini was somewhat obnoxious; no wonder the quiet one had appealed to someone as reserved as Evan. Come to think of it, Tracey had also seemed like an outsider to the Slytherin girls, too.

"I don't think he's bothered about you being Muggle-born, so much as what me associating with you considering that you're Muggle-born might mean for his association with me," Evan had explained when she'd told him her problem with Nott.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he's from a Dark Pure-blood family; his father, who was rumoured to have been in You-Know-Who's inner circle, will want to know whom Theo associates with. I'm borderline in that regard, because my mum is a famous Muggle-born Gryffindor, but my dad's sort of known in those Dark circles from the War. But now I'm spending my time with you, and that makes me less good of a choice."

"You actually think like that all the time?" Hermione had asked with incredulity, and Evan had given her that wide, genuine smile that always lit up his eyes and made her awed anew by their vibrancy.

"That's why it's such a relief to spend time with you; you not only don't care about it, you hardly even get it. Slytherin House is stressful sometimes."

"But... but that's ridiculous! To think like that! We're _twelve_!"

"Oh, not all Slytherins are like that," Evan had promised. "Just those whose families are well-off, conservative Pure-bloods. You know, those whose parents thought they'd have to go into politics, so it would be better to teach them young."

"Did _your_ father teach _you_ that?"

"He always tells me to be careful, but he doesn't expect me to behave like that; and I'm pretty sure Mum would hate it. She hates politics."

"But what about the Coalition for Muggle-Borns?"

"Yeah, she was its leader for four years; doesn't mean she likes it, though."

"You Slytherins are weird," Hermione had decided and closed the subject.

Nott didn't, as a rule, have any interest in studying with them, but if he and Evan happened to be in some discussion or other when Evan arrived for his and Hermione's study time, then the reedy boy often chose to sit in the very corner, where no one would see him, and finish the conversation, before pulling out some book and doing his own thing while Evan and Hermione studied. She disliked those instances greatly, because Theodore Nott set her teeth on edge with the looks he sometimes gave her, when he thought she wouldn't notice, like he wasn't quite certain if he respected her or hated her. Still, if she happened to join in with their discussion, Nott responded to her as calmly as he did to Evan, so at least she could consider them to be on cordial, if very cool, terms.

Some of her fellow Ravenclaws seemed to find it strange that she'd be friends with a Slytherin. Hermione, after getting to know Evan, had dug through the books on recent wizarding history in search of more information on his parents, and had by the end of that week become enchanted with Lily Evans Snape, not only because of the good Evan's mother had instigated with her formation of the CMB and her insistence on the schooling reforms, but also because she'd very effectively shown that Muggle-born witches and wizards weren't anything to sneer at. Her hero-worship of Evan's mother had given Hermione a fierce sense of pride in her own heritage, and she didn't hesitate to remind people of it when they seemed to forget it on account of her grades. So, she could understand the confusion of her classmates about her friendship with Evan, and her acquaintanceship with Tracey.

And, really, the fellow Eagles weren't all that bad; when he wasn't up to his eyeballs in books on Magical Architecture, Kevin Entwhistle was fun to be around. He'd managed to bring about ten different Muggle board games with him, and Stephen Cornfoot appeared so fascinated by them that Kevin more often than not practically begged Hermione to play with them, because she was the only other Ravenclaw firstie who actually knew the rules, on account of the fact the Granger family held a game night once a week. The other three boys held a dislike for Kevin and Stephen, so they tended to steer clear of them, and after becoming friends with Evan, Hermione hadn't felt a particular need to ingratiate herself with the female half of the Ravenclaw first-years, so she often ended up shunned by them. The only one who didn't seem to care one way or another was Lisa Turpin, but that was mostly because she didn't seem to care about any of her classmates in general, having been initiated into her older sister's group of friends.

She'd tried to introduce Evan to Kevin and Stephen, and it hadn't gone too well – Stephen, having grown up in a household that had been Ravenclaws for generations, seemed to believe that to be anything else made people less worthy, while Kevin had a tendency to talk far too much about himself. Both of these things were just too incompatible with Evan, leaving everyone with the impression that they didn't like the other party and weren't interested in deepening the acquaintanceship. Hermione felt only a little miffed that where Evan had introduced her to two tolerable people, she'd not managed to get him to like her two, but she supposed _having_ friends in the first place was more than she'd ever had before, and that soothed the sting of it quite nicely.

As October waned, though, so did Evan's good mood. He gradually became less chatty, more irritable, and more than once, Hermione had found herself biting down on sharp retorts because she didn't want to get into any arguments with him. She wasn't blind to the darkening circles under his eyes, or the way his hair stayed greasy for longer periods of time, as if he was pushing off washing it longer and longer. He buried himself in books and his grades shot up, yes, but in all other aspects, he began withdrawing into himself so much that by the last weekend in October, Hermione seriously considered going to talk to Professor Slora about it (she would have gone to Slughorn, but Evan had told her that their Latin professor usually dealt with Slytherin students far more than the old wizard did).

She was debating the very point early on Saturday morning as she trekked to the library, her language textbooks and practice books in hand. Even though they had a good fourteen subjects, Evan and Hermione were quick and efficient when studying, so that come weekend, all Hermione had left to do were the three extra language classes she was taking. It was far more demanding than she had been used to, but most of the material wasn't actually new – the non-magical classes had obviously been designed with the foreknowledge that a good half of the student body at least hadn't gone to school before, least of all a Muggle one, and that their home-schooling probably hadn't included things like the theory of evolution or who Jules Verne was.

The library was open; Madam Pince was an early riser, and there were always Ravenclaw stragglers who preferred studying early in the morning, so even though it was only quarter to seven, the doors to this school's wing were unlocked. Hermione was a little earlier than normal today, on account of the fact that Sue had picked up a cold and had been blowing her nose all night, so that Hermione had finally gotten fed up with being woken up by loud honking and just decided to get an early start.

Evan was at their usual table, far in the back of the library, near the restricted section, where hardly anyone ever ventured. He was sniffing, loudly, and breathing heavily, so for a moment Hermione thought that he'd also picked up the cold.

Then she actually saw him, and her heart sank.

Evan was crying, curled up on himself; his books were strewn around the table in his usual chaotically orderly fashion, but he wasn't reading. Instead, the soles of his feet were on his seat, and he was hugging his legs tightly, forehead leaning against his knees. His whole frame was shaking, and every few second, there was a soft gasp that clearly indicated another sob.

Biting her lip lightly, Hermione placed her books on the table as quietly as she could.

"Evan?"

His head shot up, and it was obvious that he'd been crying for a while now, because there was clear snot leaking out of his nose, his eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks were very puffy. His lanky hair, very greasy by now, was half-plastered to his forehead, strands of it sticking to the tear-tracks, even as a fresh bout of salty water tumbled over his eyelids to tread the path to his chin.

He really did look completely awful.

Finally noticing her, Evan began wiping his cheeks hastily and very roughly with the sleeves of his jumper.

"What're you doing here?" he asked, his voice raspy and nasal because of his clogged nose. "We're not meeting until half seven."

"I couldn't sleep, Sue has a cold... Evan, what's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Evan..."

"I said nothing," he shot back, though he choked on the last syllable as another sob broke through. "Leave me alone."

Well, she had no intention of doing _that_. Whatever was going on, it was obviously not a new development, and she had about had it with his misery. So, she pulled a chair out from the table, aligned it with his and plopped herself down, diving into her bag to dig up paper tissues she knew she had in there somewhere.

"Here," she offered when she'd found them. Evan took one out of the packet and wiped at his cheeks before blowing his hooked nose loudly – honking, really, that was how loud it was – and dampening the tissue disgustingly with snot. "Please, tell me what's wrong."

"I told you, it's nothing," he hissed back, blinking so that the rest of the tears in his eyes fell.

"It's not nothing," she shot back, "or you wouldn't be crying."

"Why can't you mind your own bloody business for once?!" he screamed, feet falling to the floor as he shot out of his chair. Hermione felt her own eyes watering at his words, and sternly told herself to keep it together. He was just upset, he didn't mean it.

"Because you're my best friend, and you're hurting, and I want to help!" she exclaimed, also standing up. Two steps, and she was throwing her arms around his neck, holding firmly to him as he tried to wrench free. But the struggle left him soon enough, and she could tell the exact moment it did – Evan slumped into her and began shaking again, his arms snaking around her waist to clutch desperately at her jumper.

Hermione had never really done this before – comforted anyone. She was an only child, and her parents were usually very even-keeled people. The only time she'd seen her mum cry was when her grandma had fallen down the stairs and broken her hip badly enough to need surgery, so she'd seen how her dad had comforted her. He'd pulled her mum into a hug and held her tightly until her mum had stopped crying, just like Hermione was doing now. She hoped she was doing it right, because Evan was important to her and she didn't want to disappoint him.

After a while, Evan became too heavy for her to support, so she loosened her hold on him and pulled him by the hand back to the chair. She offered him another tissue, and he cleaned himself up again, looking finally like he was going to calm down.

"Thanks," he muttered, so unintelligibly she almost didn't catch it. His cheeks were splotched read in a very unflattering way, and with his swollen eyes and uncombed, greasy hair, he looked pretty bad. Hermione shied away from the word 'ugly', though she knew someone hurtful would have easily used it without it being a lie.

"Please tell me what's going on, Ev."

"I miss my mum and dad," he whispered, blinking fast and staring somewhere in the direction of their feet. "I miss Mum and Dad, and I want to go home. I really want to go home, Mi."

"Oh, Evan," she exhaled and pulled him back into a hug, finally understanding why he'd become so withdrawn.

Coming to a boarding school was an adjustment, of course, and Hermione missed her parents a lot, yes, but for the first time in her life, she had a challenging curriculum, she had a huge library at her disposal, she had access to more interesting activities than she'd ever had before, and, most importantly, she finally had friends. Well, _a_ friend, plus a few acquaintances, but still. There just never seemed to be time for wanting to be back home and missing her parents, not when there were so many other things that demanded her attention.

But Evan was obviously not like that. He liked to learn, but not if something didn't come easily to him, and now that she thought about it, she should have caught on much sooner to the fact that something was bothering him, should have figured it out when she'd first noticed that he'd stopped his grumbling and complaining about hating half of their subjects and hating how Harry Potter didn't seem to be having nearly as much trouble learning practical things as Evan did, and had instead hunkered down and begun trudging through their lessons with a single-minded determination.

He'd been trying to distract himself from the fact that he was homesick, and it was obviously not working. And Hermione wanted to help him, badly, but she had no idea how to go about doing it. They still had eight weeks before Christmas break, which was sort of a long time.

"I'm sorry I yelled at you," he murmured into her shoulder, and she pulled away so that she could see his face properly. He'd stopped crying, at least.

"You don't have to get all defensive, Evan," she pointed out. "You're my friend, and that means I want to help."

"Your best friend?" he said it in a sarcastic way, like he was half-way mocking her for saying it, but she could see the hopefulness in his eyes.

Flustered, she tucked a strand of her horrible hair behind her ear. "Um, I suppose, yeah."

He blinked, looking slightly shocked by her words, before offering her a tentative smile. "I guess you're my best friend, too, Mi."

"I am?" It was her turn to be surprised. True, he'd said something to that effect in that letter for her birthday, but she'd not actually thought he would consider her his _best_ friend. She couldn't stop a smile from spreading over her face.

Evan cleared his throat. "I'm sorry about this. I haven't been sleeping well lately, and–"

"Let's do something," she suggested, suddenly not in the least bit interested in studying. "I know it'll be a while before we can go home, so we should find something fun to do and maybe you'll feel better."

"Fun? Like what?"

She shrugged. "We can go sit outside and read a fiction novel? Or see if we like one of the clubs?"

"Chess–"

"Not chess," she cut him off, rolling her eyes. He'd been trying to convince her to learn it for weeks, even though he'd gone to one meeting and promptly given up on it, refusing to say why exactly. "How about Quizbowl?"

He debated it thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure. You have the pamphlet with you?"

"Of course," she answered, huffing when he sniggered.

He fell silent quickly enough, though, and began chewing on his lip so viciously that, by the time he'd finally decided to speak, it was red and somewhat swollen.

"I have night terrors," he said softly, eyes trained away from her face, even as his cheeks flushed unflatteringly. Hermione blinked at that and tried to remember if she'd ever read anything about it.

"Night terrors?"

"Yeah, I, ah... I wake up screaming. Or, not really wake up, I often don't even remember it happening, but when I do, it feels like... like everything's out to get me, I suppose. And it's bloody frightening, when I remember it. They'd sort of tapered off in the last year or so, but now..."

"Did you have one recently?" she asked, careful to keep her voice quiet and kind. It was obvious that he wasn't comfortable admitting this.

"Yeah, two days ago, that I remember, and one a few weeks before that I don't, and one at the beginning of the school year. That's more than I've had all this year, before I came to Hogwarts. It's fine now, Theo makes sure to keep the others away, and Mum taught me this charm to keep others from hearing, but Professor Slora always knows, and I hate it, because..." There were tears gathering in his eyes again, and he took in a deep breath, blinking furiously to drive them away. "She's not Mum and Dad, and they were always there when it happened before, but now they're not, and I'm not going to get to see them for another two months, and I..."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"I just want to go home."

"I know."

Really, what was she to say to that? She understood that he was homesick, she just had no clue how to help, because she'd never felt like that, and so she didn't know what she would have wanted in that situation. And she really, _really_ hated seeing him cry.

Hermione asked: "Did you finish _Robinson Crusoe_?" and breathed out a quiet sigh of relief when it seemed to distract him before he'd started bawling again.

"Yeah, read it last year," Evan confirmed. "You?"

"Uh-huh, for English class. We can ask Madam Pince for a fiction book, sit outside and read together. Which type of fiction do you like?"

"Murder mysteries," he fired off immediately. "I _love_ Sherlock Holmes."

Hermione scrunched her nose. "Those stories are too boring to read."

"Boring?" he replied, staring at her in abject disbelief as she neatly sorted his various books onto a pile he could carry. " _Boring_? How can _Sherlock Holmes_ be _boring_?"

"It is! In _A Study in Scarlet_ , the murder gets solved by the half-point, and then the second half of the book is used to _introduce_ the murderer to us. That's not how one is supposed to write mystery fiction."

"You can't claim that, Hermione, not when Sherlock Holmes books are one of the very first murder mystery stories published. And the story of Lucy and Jefferson Hope in _A Study in Scarlet_ is, is... like Romeo and Juliet! Classic tale of love and loss and revenge."

"And it would have been much more interesting if it had been told to us while the murder was still being solved," she contradicted. "I much prefer watching Sherlock on the telly; _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_ on ITV is far more interesting than the books."

"You're ridiculous," Evan declared, picking up the books into his arms, so that they could walk to the fiction section of the library and pick out something to read. "And I bet you like reading Hercule Poirot."

"Actually, I like Tommy and Tuppence best, but yes, I enjoy Agatha Christie."

"Typical," her friend groused. "No doubt you love _her_ story formula, where the least suspected person is always the guilty one, and you get so many red herrings in the story you're up to your eyeballs in them."

"Well, it certainly beats not even caring about who killed the dead guy! Oh, how about Nancy Drew?"

"Ugh; those are girls' books."

"So? I like them."

"I want to read something more complicated than mystery books for kids."

"Evan, we _are_ kids."

"So? Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie aren't stories for kids, and we've both read them. How about _The Maltese Falcon_?"

"No, Mum says I'm not allowed to read that yet. Dr Thorndyke?"

"Nuh-huh, those are all howcatchem; I hate that format."

"Then I guess you don't like _Columbo_ , either?"

"Well... he's ok, but only because he's fun to watch, when he pretends to be incompetent to catch the criminal. Plus, Dad doesn't like me watching telly too often, even if it is murder shows, so I only rarely watch it. Oh, how about Edgar Alan Poe?"

"Aren't there any wizarding mystery novels?"

Evan blinked in surprise, then grinned. "Of course! I've completely forgotten you've not read any. Oh, you have to read _The Body Under the Lake_! That's the first of the Norville Flosslax series." He dragged her to the opposite bookshelf, and under L for Lassiter, Germaine dug out a clearly well-read copy. "Here you go; you'll love it."

The cover depicted the Black Lake of Hogwarts, with four teenagers, three boys and a girl, standing in pairs on opposite sides; two of the boys were inspecting what looked like a dead body by the shore, while the other pair, a boy and a girl, were hiding behind a tree and observing them. Like on all wizarding book covers, the characters depicted on this one were moving, stuck in a loop as they always were on wizarding photographs. A sinister shadow trailed over the top of the cover, obscuring the bright moon every few seconds.

"I thought you said you didn't want to read children's mysteries."

"It's not. The first book is a little childish compared to the other ones, but that's only because the main characters were still in their seventh year. They're out of Hogwarts in the very next book, and they get pretty dark later on, when Norville forms his own private agency, and Sherbrand becomes an Auror. It's an origins story."

Well, the cover did look interesting, and she _was_ curious to read a murder mystery set in the wizarding world.

"All right; let's get this checked out and we can sit outside and read it after breakfast."

Evan's grin was almost contagious, and it meant that, at least for now, she'd managed to successfully distract him from his own worries. Score one for the best friend.

* * *

The day of the Gryffindor Quidditch try-outs dawned cold but clear, and Ron had been up at the crack of dawn, right alongside Harry (Seamus was dead to the world before seven-thirty, and Dean complained _incessantly_ if he was woken up before he'd decided to get up, so they'd left the other two Junior Marauders to their sleep).

When Harry had been taken away by Professor McGonagall, after his brilliant flying during their first flying lesson, Ron had been terrified that his best friend would be expelled, so he'd been very unprepared for the intense pang of envy when Harry had run down to dinner and told them, in greatest confidence and quietest whispers, that he would be trying out for the Quidditch team, but that Oliver Wood and McGonagall both thought he was a shoo-in for the Seeker position.

The envy was Ron's old companion, hated and kept close in turns. Sixth son in a family that, while not rich in material things, _was_ rich in talent – Bill, a head boy and a cursebreaker for Gringotts, successfully navigating the world of probably the most prickly creatures of Magical Britain; Charlie, with his dragons and his Prefect badge and his position as the Quidditch captain; Percy, third prefect in as many children and the apple of his mother's eye, already gunning for a position in the Ministry; Fred and George, with their apprenticeship and their entrepreneurship even at age eleven, destined to be great inventors if only they would actually be in the mood for it; and, cherry on the cake, little Ginny, the first Weasley girl in seven generations, who could do no wrong and was using that to the fullest – Ron had always felt lost and forgotten, unable to match his siblings and frustrated constantly because of it.

Perhaps, if he'd met Harry only at Hogwarts, he would have considered _that_ the one thing his brothers didn't have, the famous best friend. But Ron didn't really remember a time before Harry; Molly had been quick enough to pick up the 'overbearing mother' side of the parental unit when Sirius Black had first gotten custody of Harry (with Lily Snape filling in for the 'disciplinarian mother' side, even if in a much smaller role), so he and Ron had practically been cradle buddies. He'd gone through that phase, of course, when he'd liked to tell everyone that he was best friends with _the_ Harry Potter, but it had never been something that had taken root within him. In his mind, Harry was not the Boy-Who-Lived; Harry was Harry, his best mate, his first friend, brother-from-another-mother, as he'd heard once on a wireless playing some American Muggle music. Harry was a charismatic person by nature, the type to draw people in, and Ron had never truly minded playing second fiddle to him, the way he'd minded it with his brothers, simply because it felt like the natural order of things, boy and his best friend, and Ron cast in the position of the main supporting actor.

It helped that Harry cared greatly for Ron's opinion on plenty of things. He never made Ron feel stupid, the way his brothers did, and he never, ever forgot that Ron was a person, an individual in his own right. Not 'the Weasley boy', not 'Harry Potter's buddy', not 'one of those troublesome Gryffindors', and not 'that ginger idiot'; to Harry, Ron was Ronald Weasley, the strategist, the playmate, the fellow Quidditch obsessive, the best friend.

Harry made it easy for Ron to push past the envy, because he never made Ron feel neglected. Harry's perspective on his fame was a strangely push-and-pull sort of thing; he loved the attention, but Ron had never seen him use his name to get what he wanted – to the contrary, Harry actively despised the very thought of it. Getting recognised and receiving things (be it affection, attention or material things) for it was all right, but trying to wheedle those things on account of people knowing the name but possibly not connecting it to Harry himself was absolutely not acceptable. This meant that Harry didn't go around reminding people of his moniker, and so most people, once they got to know him, seemed to forget that he was someone special.

This meant that Ron wasn't competing with Harry's fame for the boy's attention in most situations, which allowed him to feel secure in their friendship. The few times that Harry had seemed distracted by the attention of other people, all Ron had had to do was stand in Harry's line of vision, and his friend would be quick to include him in whatever was going on. It never failed to make Ron feel better, just like it never failed to make him feel a hundred feet tall when Harry turned to him for planning some elaborate prank or plan. Harry _trusted_ him, and Ron had long ago promised himself never to fail that trust, and if it meant that sometimes he had to battle his own envy and grudge at becoming invisible the moment Harry came onto the scene... well, it was worth it most of the time.

So, he had had to work through the envy he felt at Harry getting a chance at a spot on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, and fast, before Harry had noticed it. He still wasn't sure if he was completely all right with it, but he was definitely feeling more excitement for his friend than jealousy over it.

Harry, for his part, looked more than a little excited.

"Sirius promised me a Numbus 2000 if I get on the team," he said as he piled food on his plate; Ron would have been so nervous in Harry's situation that he wouldn't have been able to keep even a bite down, but Harry, as usual, seemed to be all confidence and no nerves. "It was a bet, that I'd beat Dad's record."

"What if you don't get in?"

Harry shrugged. "He gets to gloat about my disappointment. But that's not going to happen; Oliver said that he'd been really worried that we wouldn't have a good Seeker this year until McGonagall told him about me."

"Oh, Fred and George will never let me live it down that you'd gotten on the team and I hadn't," Ron muttered, trying to sate his misery with sausages.

"Just tell them we get to have a Nimbus 2000 because of it and they don't," Harry replied, which brightened Ron up considerably when he thought of his brothers' faces if he were to tell them that. That was another thing about Harry; he could have said that he'd be lending Ron the broom, as if Ron was a charity case who needed to be treated as such. Instead, he'd said that they'd both have the broom, like it was absolutely normal that their things were shared between them (which, more often than not, it was). Ron wasn't blind to these things, but he suspected that Harry might be, and that made him feel better somehow, which was why he'd never gotten around to telling his best friend his thoughts on the subject.

"Do you think it's worth asking them about the Map?"

"Well, if anyone would be able to figure out the Senior Marauders' protections on the Map, it'd be those two," Harry said once he'd swallowed his food. "But I'm not sure we could ever get them to give it to us if they're the ones who have it."

"It would explain how they know every single place in the castle, though," Ron pointed out.

"Could we steal it from them?"

"No way; I'm sure they always keep it with them, and if not, then it'll be heavily warded. You should see their trunks when we're home. Mum tried to sort them out once, and she ended up being purple for five days afterwards; it clashed horribly with her hair, and she was really angry with them. They ended up spending the week at the Snapes'."

"What, really?" Harry asked with a grimace. "Ugh, I can't imagine having to spend _any_ time with that slimeball."

"Well, I suppose it was either that or suffer her wrath." Ron couldn't help his shudder. "Trust me, after five days, even I was desperate enough that I'd have chosen to escape almost anywhere that Mum wasn't. She had to owl Bill, and he'd just gotten to Egypt at the time, so it took him a while to send her details for the counter-spell. Besides, you and I may hate Snape, but Fred and George spend every free moment they have working for his parents, and Ginny thinks he's the best thing since Quidditch. It's because their senses of humour are the same," he muttered darkly, remembering the numerous occasions when his sister and that slimy Slytherin had made fun of him.

"His mum's really nice," Harry admitted, sounding a little wistful. "Did you know that she taught me a whole set of charms for manipulating my glasses for my last birthday?"

"Really? What kind of charms?"

"Well, repairing them first," Harry admitted, looking sheepish; Ron memorised the expression, to bring up whenever Harry annoyed him next, because he looked absolutely hilarious like that.

"You do have a tendency to break them," the red-head agreed with a smirk. 'Tendency' was an understatement, really; when he'd first gotten them at the age of five, Harry had broken his glasses every other week, and when he was nine, he had spent the whole summer figuring out alternate uses for his glasses, which had often left them so misshapen that the adults had had a hard time figuring out how to get them back to their original form. Even now, Harry usually ended up breaking his glasses every three or four months, just by being careless.

"She also taught me how to make them water-proof, how to clean them, how to make them stick to my face and not fall off, how to change their colour, and how to tint them, for when the sun is very strong. She said she'd teach me how to change their shape just as soon as she learned how to do it without affecting the lenses; I guess the shape and size of the glass is tied to how good they are, so it's not something to mess about with."

"It'll certainly be useful for Quidditch games. Charlie almost got pneumonia in his fifth year because they had to play in this horrible rainstorm, and the game went on for almost eight hours."

"Definitely not looking forward to that," Harry agreed, finishing up his pumpkin juice. "So, we can't steal the Marauder's Map from your brothers if they have it. Could we bargain for it?"

"If there's something they'd want from us," Ron said with a shrug, then remembered himself. "And _not_ anything involving favours, Harry."

"Obviously," his friend agreed. "We'll have to figure out if they have it first, and if they do, then we need to be sneaky about it."

"Let's figure out if they have it first; then we can deal with getting it."

"Yeah. Come on, I don't want to be late."

The Quidditch pitch was already occupied by a number of vaguely familiar faces, and, of course, the whole Gryffindor Quidditch team, dressed in full gear. Fred and George were leaning on their brooms – _naturally_ – with their bats resting on their shoulders, and from what Ron could determine, were currently paying a little too much attention to one of the Gryffindor Chasers, a girl Ron thought was named Angelina, who looked far more grown-up than either of his brothers, though she was in their year. She was currently involved in a hushed conversation with the other Chaser, Alicia. The third Chaser had graduated last year, so that was one of the open spots for the try-outs this year. Oliver Wood seemed quite involved with the paper board he was holding in his hand, his pencil tip firmly lodged between his teeth. There was only one reserve player, a sixth-year reserve Keeper whose name Ron thought to be Gerald, who was some ways away from the main group, having an obviously irrelevant conversation with another Gryffindor upper-year.

Ron thumped Harry on the shoulder and indicated he'd go find himself and the other two (when they woke up, that was) some seats on the stands, to which Harry answered with his usual happy smile and a loopy salute, before wandering off to join the group that was obviously the potential team candidates. Ron eyed them, playing a guessing game with himself as to who would be well-suited for which position; Fred and George had taken over last year as the Beaters, and Angelina had been moved from reserve last year when one of the older Chasers had suffered a bad elbow injury and had had to quit the team, but Alicia had only been the reserve Chaser until now, which meant they'd have to get at least two Chasers, probably three. Reserves were always good to have. Ron's brothers were pretty much Bludgers in and of themselves, so there was no freaking way someone would incapacitate them, not in any activity related to Quidditch, and Oliver probably wouldn't bother with reserves for those positions. The team captain was the Keeper, and they already had a reserve in the stocky sixth-year.

Charlie was gone, though, so the Seeker position was open, and that was definitely the weakest link in their team, because they'd not had one descent reserve for that position in five years, and even with Charlie's frankly ridiculous talent, there had always been something conspiring against the Gryffindor team in the years of Charlie's reign, often with him being the only thing pulling them forward. This year, four out of seven players were third-years, so the Seeker would have to be damn good if they were going to win anything.

Which meant they were pretty desperate for Harry. Ron was a good player in general, but Harry was probably the best flyer Ron had ever seen among his peers, always willing to do the craziest stunts to win and never getting hurt in the process. Gryffindor _needed_ Harry in that position, and Ron was nothing if not loyal to his Quidditch teams.

His envy was gone like it had never even existed, and all that was left in its wake were a sincere hope that Harry would get the spot and a burning desire to win the Quidditch Cup.

Even from the bleachers, Ron managed to see the crazed look in Oliver Wood's eyes when he spied Harry in the line-up, though it was nothing to the self-satisfied grin he sported after Harry gave him the permission slips, stamped and signed by Mr Black, Madam Hooch, Professor McGonagall and Headmaster Dumbledore himself. If he'd been rubbing his hands together, he would have looked like one of the mad wizards on the Chocolate Frog cards.

It took a while for the try-outs to actually begin, mostly because Madam Hooch, who oversaw the try-outs, had to wrangle the observers out of the way. Finally, though, the Quidditch team members lifted off into the air and Oliver tossed them the Quaffle, before releasing one of the two Bludgers and grabbing his own broom. Fred and George took up the crazed ball expertly, while Angelina and Alicia began practicing their tosses between themselves to warm up. Meanwhile, Oliver approached the group of potential players, effectively forcing order and silence on the observer stragglers, as well as getting the team candidates to face him straight on.

Ron, cleverly having chosen a spot close enough that he could hear what they were talking about, settled himself comfortably to observe. He'd only ever been to professional games, where he'd always sat too far away to actually hear anything, and was dead curious about how these things went.

Oliver began by taking a roll call and checking that all candidates were actually present. He noted the positions that each person was interested in, before (wisely, in Ron's opinion) just running all of them through basic exercises that included a lot of manoeuvres more often used by one or the other position. Harry, smallest of the lot by far, was the fastest even on those old school broomsticks. He had absolutely no problem doing even the most demanding of moves, and Ron hooted and hollered whenever his best friend outmatched one of the other best candidates.

After the exercises, Oliver had the team set up for an actual play, dividing the four team members evenly among the two teams and filling up the empty spots – two Chasers each, one Beater and one Seeker each, and one Keeper with the other one being the reserve. He placed Harry on the team with Fred and Angelina.

Then he released one of the old Snitches (as only new ones were used for matches, the flesh memory often never fully able to be scrubbed from the recycled ones) and had everyone start playing, he himself flying around and clearly assessing everyone's play. Around that time, Seamus and Dean showed up, instantly accosting Ron with questions about the proceeding so far, so he spent a few minutes explaining everything in detail to them.

The other two members of their group were, slowly but surely, becoming Ron's best friends too, though he didn't think they were there yet. Seamus could be very standoffish and liked to put down people around him, though it more often than not seemed to be unconscious. Dean, in contrast, was the friendliest guy Ron had met in a long time, but he _loved_ talking about his stupid football, and Ron really had no interest in it _at all_. Ron had also secretly harboured fears that they'd supplant him in Harry's mind as his best friend at the very beginning, which had made him keep a distance between himself and the other two. However, so far, that hadn't happened in the least; on the contrary, the other two seemed to have become as close as Harry and Ron were, which did wonders to reassure Ron about his position, so that he was more and more willing to spend time with them. With their misadventure with the three-headed dog and their various little pranks, they were really becoming better friends than Ron had ever had before (not counting Harry, of course).

Dean still seemed a little confused when it came to rules, though he was very good at picking up various manoeuvres flyers could make with brooms. He seemed suitably impressed with the proceedings and quite happy that he hadn't missed the best part of the try-outs. Seamus, however, looked almost awed, which sounded strange to Ron, even after only less than two months of friendship. There were things that could psych Seamus up, but very few that could outright awe him.

Apparently, Harry's flying was one of them.

"He is brilliant! How did I not know he's this brilliant?!"

"Dunno, mate," Ron told him. "Wood's been really bloody loud about Harry being practically already on the team and all."

"I know, but, I mean... look!"

"He's pretty great, right?" Dean asked, with quite a bit less fascination. Ron grinned, thinking that Harry had finally managed to overcome their biggest hurdle – Seamus' cool demeanour towards Harry – without even knowing he'd done so. So long as that was the case, Dean's lack of understanding when it came to how good Harry was on a broom was nothing in comparison.

"He's bloody awesome, is what he is," Seamus agreed.

They watched as Oliver switched around the candidates and replaced them until he'd tried all of them out in all positions he thought they might be good for; to their immense satisfaction, he kept Harry firmly in one of the two Seeker positions, and overall treated him exactly as he treated the rest of the teammates. Harry caught the Snitch relatively frequently with his gloved hands, though that wasn't too surprising, since they were using old Snitches, which tended to like flying around people in general far more than new ones did. Still, he was faster and more agile than anyone else placed on the opposing Seeker position.

Really, for all intents and purposes, he'd already gotten the spot.

In the end, the empty Chaser spot was filled by a second-year named Katie Bell, making them the only official school Quidditch team with girls in all positions of the same type. The old reserve Keeper was kept as such, clearly having more practice than everyone else aside from Oliver himself. Of all the candidates, two ended up good enough to fill in as reserve Chasers, and they even found one muscly fourth-year to be a reserve Beater. Unfortunately, the whole lot, aside from Harry, were abysmal as Seekers, and Oliver decided not to take a reserve Seeker. Having a bad Seeker was pretty much similar to having no Seeker at all; in such cases, only hedging the Chaser positions helped, and Oliver had done pretty well on that one, even though the team was largely composed of kids from eleven to thirteen years of age.

All in all, Ron thought they might actually have a shot this year, which left him very cheerful when Harry ran up to them with a face-splitting smile on his face, yelling 'I'm in, I'm in, I'm in'.

"We know, mate," Dean told him, a little dryly, though he looked amused by their leader's antics.

"We all knew you'd get in," Ron volunteered loyally.

"I know. I mean, I thought I would, too, but still! I'm in! I'm the youngest player in a century!"

"Just make sure to win us the Cup, and we'll be tossing you in the air," Seamus said with a grin of his own, clearly having had a blast. "Now come on, I'm starvin', and I bet you're too, so let's go eat!"

If there was one thing everyone could rely on, it was on stomachs of little boys being bottomless pits (as Ron would have cheerfully confirmed for anyone wishing to know).


	12. Ch 12: The Dangerous Troll Encounter

**Chapter 11: The Dangerous Encounter of the Troll Variety**

As October waned, the first-years of the 1991/92 school year found themselves finally truly settling into the Hogwarts life. The demanding school schedule had started in earnest, with their fourteen subjects taking up forty periods a week, which usually meant that they were sitting in class until four in the afternoon, with their evenings free for the various clubs and groups that had started meeting. There was a method to the madness, though: their magical subjects tended to alternate between pure theory and primarily practice, and the professors appeared very good at coordinating who was doing which of these each week, so that the students were never overwhelmed by either type of homework; the professors teaching non-magical subjects demanded as much as those teaching magical subjects, but they had more lax deadlines with regards to assignments, giving the students enough room to focus primarily on their magical training. The subject matter of these classes leaned heavily on the review of those things that students who had attended Muggle schools had covered their previous year of schooling (which allowed them the necessary time to train their magic), while still being strenuous enough that those who had been home-schooled (and thus had more knowledge of the basics of their magical subjects) truly did learn what was appropriate for their age group.

Harry and his Junior Marauders had all joined the football club, though Harry only attended very sporadically due to the increasing demand of Quidditch practice on his time. Ron usually only went when Harry did, as he didn't seem to find any enjoyment in the sport at all, and much preferred his chess club, but Dean quickly proved himself as a very competent player for his age, and Seamus wasn't half-bad, either, though he had a preference for the goalie position. Harry and Ron tested out of their flying lessons, though Seamus and Dean were forced to attend at least until the winter hols with Neville, who was still as horrible at it as he had been the first day. Harry actually felt bad for the boy, as his fear of heights was obvious on his face every time he told his broom to lift him up. The Slytherins didn't help in the least with that, finding as many opportunities for barbs as they could, though at least the good thing was that Malfoy had also been deemed good enough to not have to attend after the first month.

Hallowe'en snuck up on Harry almost unnoticed in all the business of the school year, and when the notice appeared on their board that a great feast would be held and that attendance was mandatory, he found himself almost jumping for excitement. Sirius and Remus had regaled him with stories about the many, many delicious dishes that would be served, and Harry was quite looking forward to it. If breakfast that day was any indication of what was to come, the feast was going to be amazing – not least because half-way through the meal, a large package carried by six screech owls was neatly dropped right in the middle of his food.

"The broom!" Harry exclaimed, meal forgotten as he picked up the note attached to the rope holding the package wrapped. It was from Sirius, of course; Harry knew that handwriting perfectly well. It said:

 _Prongslet, as per our agreement, your very own official-Quidditch-level broom. You've earned it, and I'm looking forward to seeing you beat your old man's record come first Quidditch match. Hope it's everything you expected. I've squared it with the Headmaster, and you're allowed to use it. Sirius_

"If you would be so kind, Mr. Potter," Professor Florrel said, sidling up to Harry's group just as Harry had reached to unwrap his present, "don't unpack it until you are in your dorm; the house-elves have put a lot of effort into this meal, and if others were to see the make and model, they might be inclined to stampede all over the tables to get a better look."

So the Junior Marauders ended up cutting their breakfast short and hurrying back to their room to properly admire the Nimbus Two Thousand. Unfortunately, half-way there, they ran into Malfoy and his cronies, and it was all Harry could do to pull his broom away when the blond Slytherin reached for it.

"Hands off my stuff," he hissed at the other boy, narrowing his eyes behind his glasses.

"That's a broomstick," Malfoy noted with a funny mix of jealousy and spite on his face. "You'll be in for it this time, Potter. First-years aren't allowed them."

"It's not any old broomstick," Ron told the Slytherin with a triumphant look. "It's a Nimbus Two Thousand. What did you say you've got at home, Malfoy, a Comet Two Sixty? Comets look flashy, but they're not in the same league as the Nimbus." He threw a grin Harry's way, which the Boy-Who-Lived returned with relish.

"What would you know about it, Weasley, you couldn't afford half the handle," Malfoy snapped back, and instantly Ron's face started reddening. "I suppose you and your brothers have to save up, twig by twig."

Ron opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, Professor Flitwick appeared silently by Malfoy's elbow, no doubt having smelled a brewing conflict.

"Not arguing, I hope, boys?" he squeaked.

"Potter's been sent a broomstick, Professor," Malfoy was quick to point out.

If he expected some reprimand or even seizure of said broomstick, he was in for a big disappointment, Harry thought.

"Yes, yes, that's right," Flitwick noted, beaming at Harry. "Professor McGonagall told me all about the special circumstances, Potter. What model is it?"

"A Nimbus Two Thousand, sir," Harry replied, congratulating himself on keeping his composure at the look of abject horror on Malfoy's face. "My godfather and I had a bet, you see, about whether I'd make the team this year. I really couldn't have done it without Malfoy here, you know, so it's really thanks to him that I've got it."

They left Malfoy to stew in his rage, bursting into uproarious laughter as soon as they turned a corner.

"Did you see his face?!" Dean exclaimed.

"Oh, man, that was hilarious," Seamus agreed.

"Also, true," Harry added as they ascended the stairs to the Gryffindor Tower. "He _had_ given me the perfect opportunity to show off my flying when he stole that Remembrall."

They ended up admiring the broomstick until it was time for their classes, and spent most of the day in very good spirits.

That was, of course, until Charms class, right after lunch. Flitwick informed them that, in honour of the witching holiday, they would be starting on the practice portion of the Levitation Charm a little earlier than planned (this being Thursday and the last Charms class of the week), which had most of them quite excited to finally be making objects fly. Harry, in particular, had been dying to learn the spell, because he could just imagine the various uses he would have in their pranks.

They'd continued with their little pranks, though they limited them to small things, mostly against Slytherins and Ravenclaws that annoyed them. Fred and George, contrary to what Harry had expected, hadn't started a pranking war with them, though Ron said it was early days yet – the twins preferred to make a big bang at the end of the school year, rather than bother themselves with little things in the beginning. Adding the Levitation Charm to their repertoire would be of immense use.

As had become the norm, Flitwick paired them up with Ravenclaws for practice – Harry was paired with Padma Patil, who usually accepted his pointers with enough grace that they got along swimmingly; Neville was, luckily, placed with Stephen Cornfoot, who was a prat and generally a stuck-up git, but had enough patience for the accident-prone Gryffindor that the number of mishaps had gradually fallen around him; Dean worked with Kevin Entwhistle, and the two Muggle-borns had found enough common ground not to mind their pairing; Seamus had to suffer the exasperation of Anthony Goldstein with regards to his tendency to explode the objects they were trying to charm; and poor Ron was stuck with the bushy-haired bookworm know-it-all Granger, who was neck and neck with Harry for the top of the class and generally extremely annoying with how perfectionist she attempted to be every single lesson.

And, no matter how much he put up a front throughout the day, Malfoy's comments regarding Ron's family's lack of wealth had been getting to the red-haired boy since the morning, which had left him in a very stormy mood. So, when Ron couldn't pull off the spell no matter what he tried, while Hermione did it in her first try, Harry knew that the day would not be ending well at all.

"Don't forget that nice wrist movement we've been practicing!" Professor Flitwick squeaked from his pile of books at the front of the classroom. "Swish and flick, remember, swish and flick. And saying the magic words properly is very important, too – never forget Wizard Baruffio, who said 's' instead of 'f' and found himself on the floor with a buffalo on his chest."

"I bet he hardly had the breath to tell that tale," Harry murmured to Padma, who giggled in response. She had a nice laugh, at least, not nearly as bad as Lavender Brown, and Harry enjoyed entertaining her enough to hear it. " _Wingardium Leviosa_ ," he intoned, remembering Remus' instruction on proper accentuation of Latin words. The feather shook a little on its way up, but it did rise without much trouble. Padma's, unfortunately, didn't.

"How do you manage it so easily, Harry?"

"Oh, I guess I'm just naturally gifted; my dad was really good at wandwork, too," he replied. "Try making a little bit of an arch with you hand, like this. My uncle Remus says that it helps with making the spell stronger."

This time, her feather shivered and attempted to rise, which earned him a sigh and a gentle smile.

"That's good. Try extending the 'gar' sound a little more, too." He showed her again how he'd done it, and succeeded in making the feather lift up and down several times with his wand. Resettling determinately in her seat, Padma tried again.

" _Win_ gar _dium Leviosa._ "

Shakily, her feather lifted off the desk, and she rewarded Harry with a dazzlingly happy smile.

"Oh, I did it! Thank you, Harry."

An explosion to their right startled them both enough that their feathers fluttered to the ground. When Harry turned, Seamus was trying to put out the little fire with his hat. He'd set fire to the feather again.

" _Wingardium Leviosa!_ " Ron's voice rang out to Harry's right, the words completely mangled and so far from their correct pronunciation that it was no wonder nothing happened; to top it, Ron was windmilling his arm so wildly he was liable to poke someone's eye out with his wand before making the feather move.

"You're saying it wrong," Hermione told him, somewhat snappishly and quite loudly. "It's Wing- _gar_ -dium Levi- _o_ -sa, make the 'gar' nice and long. And stop waving your arms about, you'll poke someone's eye out like that."

"You do it then, if you're so clever," Ron snarled back at her.

So she did. An elegant flick of her wand, a precise, smooth incantation, and the feather was off the desk without a hitch, rising to hover about four feet above their heads, certainly far higher than Harry's, thus attracting their professor's attention where his had not.

"Oh, well done!" Professor Flitwick cried, clapping. "Everyone see here, Miss Granger's done it!"

"Professor, Harry did too," Padma said loyally, and Harry demonstrated his own proficiency by lifting Padma's feather from the ground with the spell and sending it into her hand to earn himself another smile from the pretty girl.

"Well done, indeed! Two points for Ravenclaw and Gryffindor each, for the first who've done it superbly."

Harry offered Granger a triumphant smirk, to which she only narrowed her eyes. Ron, beside her, remained fuming, and utterly failed to lift the feather by the end of the class. Suffice it to say, his mood was not a good one as they all shuffled out of the class.

"It's no wonder no one can stand her," he said loudly to Harry, Dean and Seamus. "She's a nightmare, honestly, and now she's even managing to ruin the lessons even when she's not in the same house as us!"

Before any of the other three boys could answer, something brushed up forcefully against Harry's shoulder, nearly tripping him in his step. Startled, he looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of Granger's face as she barrelled past him – there were tear tracks on her cheeks.

"I think she heard you," Dean said softly.

"So?" Ron asked, looking after her. For a moment he appeared guilty, before apparently shrugging it off. "I'm sure she knows she's got no friends."

"She does hang out with Snape," Seamus pointed out.

"Even worse!"

Since their last class of the day was with Hufflepuffs, the boys didn't see the bushy-haired girl any more, and it was easy to forget about her when faced with a lesson in plant anatomy. They hurried to get back to their dorm as soon as the class was over, as the day was nice enough that they would be able to go flying on Harry's new broom for a bit.

Even so, they were some of the first ones down to the Great Hall when the time for dinner came. In the second-floor corridor, they ran across the Patil twins, and Harry slowed down just to make sure that Padma would notice him; the girls seemed pretty absorbed in their gossip, which was apparently about... Granger?

"...N the girls' toilets, has been since Charms Class. I tried to get her to come down with me, but she wanted to be left alone to cry. Really, boys can be so stupid."

"Weasley definitely," Parvati agreed. "Though you seem like Harry–"

"Shhh," Padma shushed her, giving Harry a distracted smile, obviously not wanting him to hear whatever her sister thought about Harry. In general, Harry didn't much care for girls, but it was nice to have a willing audience for the stuff that he was brilliant at (like wandwork), and as someone very used to all kinds of attention, he knew the value of cultivating it from the start.

He hurried back to his group, thinking that he should probably ask Sirius what the best way of handling girls was. After all, Sirius _was_ pretty popular with a lot of women in their immediate social circle, and he'd caught wind of plenty of stories about the Senior Marauders' Hogwarts exploits. He didn't want them hanging all over him like he'd heard some girls did with his dad, but he did think that being simply rude to them when they bothered him would be a bad idea. And, if all else failed, he was sure Remus would be a good source of unbiased information on the subject.

That decided, he joined his three best friends at the Gryffindor table in their conversation about the benefit of using Peeves for their prank, putting aside any further thoughts on girls, those who liked Harry or otherwise.

* * *

Hallowe'en had always been a somewhat neglected holiday in the Snape household; Evan's mum had never truly gotten in the habit of celebrating it throughout her Hogwarts years, and Evan's dad had always stated that he could only tolerate one decorative holiday in a half-year, which meant that Christmas got the privilege. In truth, Hallowe'en was the more religious of the two, if only in the most secular sense of it having more spiritual value due to the actual, factual existence of ghosts and the afterlife in the wizarding sense, but the commerciality of Christmas and the cheer associated with it had always seemed like a more worthwhile pursuit (well, other than the year of 1984, but they didn't talk about that Christmas, ever).

Still, he had to admit to himself that the Great Hall was _magnificent_ today. There were carved pumpkins everywhere, with candles flickering inside and casting odd and interesting shadows; the ceiling was a deep indigo of early night, not yet fully black but on its way, stars twinkling in the distance. A thousand live bats fluttered from the walls and ceiling, a thousand more swooping over the tables in low black clouds, and the cat familiars twisting around children's feet occasionally tried to catch one in their jaws. The ghosts were floating about, far more numerous than was usual, and the picture frames hanging on the walls were filled with portraits, all gossiping and peering down at the students. Even the banners of the four houses were decorated with cobwebs and little cauldrons, cheery and festive in a way Evan had never experienced.

"This... is pretty cool," Tracey said, stepping up to him and looking around with wide eyes. Evan nodded his head in agreement and let Stheno jump from his arms to his usual sitting spot at the Slytherin table, her ears flicking around and her eyes almost hypnotised by the swarm of bats flying about. Though bringing familiars to the Great Hall was frowned upon, tonight seemed to be the exception to the rule, no doubt because black cats did sort of go together with the décor. He'd brought Stheno with him before, of course, more often than not, but she was far better behaved than any ordinary cat, being more intelligent by far, and so could be trusted not to start walking over the table or stealing food off plates.

"You've not celebrated Hallowe'en before," Theo stated, coming to stand by Tracey after a sharp look in the direction of Malfoy, Pansy and the entourage.

"Not really, no," the girl confirmed. "Da's against any sort of conformist holiday traditions. We give presents for New Year's, rather than Christmas."

Evan shook his head at the idea of not having a proper Christmas as the three Slytherins seated themselves and continued chatting about typical holidays in their households while the rest of the student population gradually migrated into the Great Hall.

"There is a _ball_ , every year," Theo said with clear distaste, "and I was obligated to go."

"The Samhain Ball," Evan confirmed. "I've heard of it, though I've never been."

"You wouldn't have, would you," Theo answered rhetorically. "You've not missed much, though, beyond Malfoy's peacocking."

Tracey snorted. "I think I'm pitying you right now."

"Yes, thank you ever so much for that, Davis. What do _you_ do for Hallowe'en?"

"Mostly, my grandparents take me to their neighbourhood children's gatherings. Apple bobbing, bonfire, carving turnips, the usual."

"Apple bobbing?" Theo asked with a frown, and it was Evan's turn to snort.

"You've never done? I guess it's a Muggle tradition, then; we'll have to do it next year. I've gone trick-or-treating with Mum a few times."

"Would have, but Da never wanted to waste anything on a costume," Tracey complained.

"But half the point's to make your own costume!"

"I know!"

They continued on in this vein for a while, moving on from Hallowe'en to Christmas and Easter; they all three agreed that Valentine's Day was the _worst_ holiday ever, and that they weren't looking forward to it in any case. By the time their discussion wound down, the food had appeared, and they dug in with relish. Tracey turned to speak with one of the second-year girls sitting to her other side, so Evan engaged Theo in a conversation about potions as he passed a few choice pieces of turkey to Stheno, who had wandered back to wind herself around his legs, having apparently gotten bored with observing the bats.

In all, the feast was going as well as Evan had expected it to, and perhaps even a little bit better, considering how high his spirits were this first holiday away from home. For the moment, he was able to push the ever-encroaching home-sickness to the back of his mind and simply enjoy the holiday among the cacophony of seven hundred children, some two thousand bats, and quite a few other creatures to boot.

Professor Qurrell's mad dash through the Hall, turban askew and terror on his face, thus, resulted in an immediate hush of the whole room. Evan, like everyone else at his table, forgot his conversation with Theo on the efficacy of dried versus fresh nettles in brewing nettle infusion to stare in intrigued surprise at the spectacle. That was, of course, until the stuttering professor gasped: "Troll – in the dungeons – thought you ought to know," and promptly fainted.

Which, of course, if the situation hadn't been that shockingly disturbing, would have made Evan snigger. His mother had very few good things to say about the stuttering professor when he'd last asked her in his letter, and his father shared nothing but his own disdainful disgust on that account. Really, the man should have remained teaching Studies in Technology if he had a problem with half of his own syllabus.

Through the uproar, Professor Dumbledore's wand shot out purple firecrackers until the room was silent again. Evan didn't really find it all that necessary to make so much ruckus. Surely, if they all stayed here and had two professors at each entrance, they'd be fine until a search party found and disposed of the troll, especially if it was in the dungeons. Besides, Dumbledore was here, and he could erect some hasty wards as extra protection. Trolls were nothing to sneer at, but they really weren't all _that_ dangerous; resistant to magic to a great extent, yes; proficient in its use, absolutely not.

* * *

"Prefects, lead your houses back to the dormitories immediately!"

"What?!" Evan gawked, startled, green eyes flying to the old man. In the silence that had followed the ruckus, his words were heard clearly across the whole room, and he felt his cheeks flaming. He hadn't meant to exclaim it out loud.

"But we live _in the dungeons_!" another Slytherin picked up his thread of thought, apparently, because the murmur was staring up again. Even if it _was_ to the wrong conclusion.

"That's where the troll is!"

"Albus, I thoroughly agree," their Head of House jumped in. "My children cannot be lead down."

"The library, then," came the answer, just making Evan stare in what had to be a very stupid expression at the headmaster. Befuddled was the word he'd use to later describe his shock to Hermione, because what _idiot_ would think that leading nigh on seven hundred students through a castle of this size with a troll on the loose would be a remotely sensible idea?

By the time everyone started shuffling about, Evan was well aware that Dumbledore had realised where his thoughts had gone, but was still not doing anything about it. Frowning, definitely not nearly crazy enough to challenge the most powerful wizard of Britain for the remarkable cretinism of that particular move (even if he did have a privately almost-grandfather-like relationship with the man), he shuffled with the rest of the Slytherins out of the Hall, already composing his letter to his father. There was probably no one else who would dare yell at Dumbledore for this stupidity other than Professor McGonagall and his dad.

It wasn't even an accidental stupidity, that much was obvious. It was _deliberate_. Evan may not have felt any form of Legilimency from the old wizard, but he was certain the man had understood Evan's _actual_ meaning of that exclamation. And the Slytherin boy wasn't nearly stupid enough to think, like so many of his housemates did, that Dumbledore had gone senile in his second century. So why had he done it, then? Dumbledore was too old to do things without any reason to them.

Well, his father did say that one time to his mother that Albus Dumbledore was a good tactician, but abysmal at seeing the trees from the forest, which Evan couldn't really even begin to understand at the time, but felt he might be starting to now. If the trees were the students and the forest was... what? He needed to talk to someone about it, exchange ideas. Theo and Tracey were a possibility, but Theo was liable to sell the information on if a good offer presented itself, and Tracey would ask too many questions Evan didn't want to give her answers to. No, he needed someone with the creative brain of a Ravenclaw, no Slytherin cunning, some Hufflepuff loyalty, and that irritating Gryffindor nosiness – which meant there was only one person who would do the job. He needed his best friend, Hermione Granger.

That was how he realised he hadn't seen her at the Ravenclaw table tonight. In and of itself, it didn't really mean all that much – they'd agreed to sit with their respective House friends tonight, and the table accommodated more than a hundred people, he could have easily missed her (except her insanely bushy hair always made her stand out, even when she had the hat on). But the situation was as far removed from normal as it could be, so biting his lip, he deliberated slightly on the pros and cons of warning the prefect, deciding in the end that it was better to be viewed even more oddly by his fellow housemates than let something happen to her.

So, when they were all shuffled safely into the library, he approached Prefect Gemma Fairley and told her he suspected that a Ravenclaw first-year named Hermione Granger didn't know about the troll. The older girl didn't seem too eager to go and help, but she nonetheless did her duty as a prefect and told their Deputy Head of House his suspicions. This resulted in the red-haired Scottish woman disappearing back into the corridor, leaving the seventh-year prefects in charge, seeing how they knew the most about DADA.

That was another thing that bugged Evan. Was there _really_ no one better than stuttering Quirrell to do the job of teaching something as important as offensive and defensive magic? The man was the Professor in charge of dangerous things like trolls, yet he fainted at the first sign of trouble, for Merlin's sake! What in the world was that about? As everyone else in the school, Evan knew very well the story behind the constantly changing array of DADA professors – the curse that You-Know-Who had placed on the position, fifty years ago, when Dumbledore had refused to give it to him. His parents had confirmed that they'd had a different professor each year during their schooling, so that had to mean that at least fifty something people had come and gone. Thinking of it that way did give him a bit more perspective on the situation – a little, but not nearly enough, because it was simply _irresponsible_ to have stuttering cowards like Quirinus Quirrell teaching something as important as Defence.

Of course, when that was your only option, then what else could you do?

Dismissing the circular thoughts out of his mind, Evan focused back on the question of _why_ Dumbledore had chosen a move so dumb on the surface. Whatever it was, it had to be connected to something larger. Evan's best guess was that it had something to do with the third floor corridor, considering that was the only Very Strange Thing in this school year. Unfortunately, that didn't tell him anything aside from the fact that something was going on, which was no revelation, and in spite of his very logical thinking, Evan wasn't a creative person, not in the way _Harry bloody Potter_ seemed to be (it was why he liked Potions so much, and never had an affinity for Transfiguration – potion-making was a very precise, delicate science, and even inventing new potions _always_ relied on commonly known facts about properties and interactions between ingredients and previously invented concoctions; transfiguration, on the other hand, required one to imagine the transfigured thing becoming something else, and the outlandishness of the results was directly proportional to the imaginative creativity of the caster). He couldn't just come up with clever, flashy idea at the drop of a hat, and especially not if he didn't have someone to talk to. He'd learned that little trick from the Weasley twins – in spite of what everyone thought, those two weren't intuitively creative like some other Gryffindors, their ideas started out very small and evolved into enormous proportions by using bits and pieces of things they'd experienced. That expansion, though, came from the fact that they bounced ideas off one another, shared them, built onto them together.

That was why he needed Hermione – Evan had a very studious mind and loved learning, but his cunning side far outweighed his creative one, which was the reason why there'd been little doubt in his mind he'd end up in Slytherin. While the two were relatively connected, they didn't necessarily require one another to function. Coming up with wild theories was not something he could just _do_. Knowing how to manipulate and use the facts he possessed didn't require him to just _guess_ the most probable solution, something he didn't have any affinity for. Hermione, however, had been a tough choice between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, which meant she had just the blend of curious and creative personality that could make those instinctual leaps of thought that required more than pure logic.

Nothing for it now, he decided with a sigh. Until this stupid situation with the troll was resolved, there really was nothing he could do about it.

* * *

Percy's voice rang out ahead of them, insisting that they need not fear the troll if they only followed his orders, which made Harry and Ron roll their eyes in tandem.

"Like he's Merlin's gift to us all," Ron groused, dawdling and trying to keep to the back of the crowd. Harry, for his part, was trying to get Dean's and Seamus' attention, as the two boys had been swept up in the tide of Gryffindors moving to the seventh floor and hadn't noticed Harry and Ron lagging behind. " _Excuse me, I_ _'_ _m a Prefect, I_ _'_ _ve been gifted with all the smarts of the world!_ "

Harry snorted at Ron's impersonation and shook his head.

"You know, I think that Hat sorted your brothers all wrong," he commented, jumping on his feet lightly to see over everyone' s heads, having mometarily completely lost sight of the other half of the Junior Marauders. It may have been an advantage in Quidditch, but he hated being so short in times like these. "The twins should have been Slytherins–"

"Thank Merlin they're not," Ron muttered, cutting him off. "Can you imagine the embarrassment, having Slytherins in the family?"

Harry wisely didn't point out that his guardian's whole family was in Slytherin, and that he actually quite liked several of those people. Instead, he barged on with his sentence as if Ron hadn't interrupted him.

"–and Perse would have been much less irritating in Ravenclaw."

"Well, at least he wouldn't have been able to lord his _power_ over us if he had."

But speaking of other houses reminded Harry of Granger after Ron had called her a nightmare, and how he'd overheard the Patil twins talking about her being in a toilet all afternoon. Which meant that she didn't know about the troll.

Stopping in his tracks, Harry grabbed a fistful of Ron's robes and pulled him back, shushing his protests with a hand over the taller boy's mouth.

"Granger wasn't at the feast, she doesn't know about the troll," he hissed in Ron's ear.

"So?" Ron replied, shaking Harry's hand off.

"So, we have to go warn her. It's your fault she doesn't know. If you had paid attention to the people around you before speaking, then she'd have known, and we can't let her get hurt for it! Besides, can you just imagine Fred's and George's faces when they hear we battled a troll?"

Ron's face blanched at that. "I thought you wanted to track down Granger, not find the troll!"

"No, of course not," Harry replied with a huff. "But they won't know that, now, will they? So come on."

"Wait, what about Seamus and Dean?"

"We don't have time to find them in this chaos," Harry replied with a wave of his hand at said chaos. "Besides, we can do this one without them, just like we've always done."

That seemed to decide it for Ron, so together, they hurried to the girls' toilets. It was anyone's guess which floor she could be on, but Harry assumed it would be the same one as their Charms classroom. Half-way there, hurried clicking of heels on stone had them momentarily freezing in fear of getting caught, before they both unfroze and ran ahead. Ron pulled the first door he saw open and they both slipped in, closing it behind them frantically, the only thing they could see before that a shimmer of dark green in the direction they'd come from. Breathing heavily, Harry placed his ear against it and listened as the footstep tapered off into the distance.

"That was close," Ron muttered beside him, sliding down to the floor.

"Too close. Did you see who it was?"

Ron's answer was forestalled by a sob from somewhere to the other side of the room they were in. With a start, both boys turned their attention away from the corridor and blinked, realising they'd inadvertently ended up in a girls' toilet, though two floors down from the one they'd been aiming for.

Sometimes Harry had the best of luck.

"Erm... Granger?" Harry called out, stepping away from the door... or trying to. His uniform was caught. Huffing in frustration, he yanked on the door latch until it opened and freed his clothes, before approaching the farthest stall from him, where he assumed the girl was. "Granger, you there?"

"Go away!" she shrieked at him, voice nasal and shrill. He had no doubt her face would be just as splotched with tears and snot. "Why won't you leave me alone?!"

"Look, you can cry later, all right, we have to get out of here now," he tried, but the girl was having none of that.

" _Does she ever stop? Bossy know-it-all, no one invited you in the first place! She_ _'_ _s a nightmare, honestly! If she ends up in the same house as I do, it_ _'_ _ll be seven years of hell!_ Well I haven't, so why won't you leave me alone if I'm so offensive to you?!"

With a sinking heart, Harry realised they'd been even less discreet than they thought. To be fair, Ron was by far the worst of the four, but none of the boys actually liked her bossy attitude. Sure, they may not have had to deal with it too much, but they shared about a half of their classes with the Ravenclaws, so they saw more of her than they'd wanted to.

"Hermione, listen to me," he attempted to reason with her once again, but she pulled the stall door in response and glared at him through her (as he'd guessed) wet eyes set in a now splotched face.

"No, you listen," she hissed, stabbing his chest with the finger of her right hand, in which she held a sopping piece of toilet paper that left wet spots on his uniform. "You are right bullies, you are, and I won't let you get away with it anymore! I'm proud of being smart, and I don't care what you think!" Her tears told a very different story, of course, but Harry didn't think it smart to point that out right about then, because Ron ran into them, pale and blue eyes wide with fright. "Ooph," she released as all three of them tumbled to the tiled floor. "What is _wrong with you_?"

But Harry wasn't paying her much attention, since through the now fully open door, he could see a small bald head covered with dull grey skin, sitting on top of a boulder-like body twelve feet tall and stinking worse than anything Harry had ever experienced. It explained why Ron had walked right into them – the troll was, slowly but surely, slouching into the room.

Hermione shrieked in terror and curled into herself, and Harry scrambled back to his feet as the troll advanced on them, knocking the sinks off the walls with its great club.

"What do we do, Harry?" Ron asked, sounding desperate. Unlike him, however, Harry didn't feel afraid; if anything, he felt a jolt of adrenaline spur him into action. Imagining this was exactly how Sirius felt when facing dark wizards in his job as an Auror, Harry pulled out his wand, and beside him, after a moment, Ron did the same.

" _Rictusempra_!" Harry yelled, waving his wand like Sirius had taught him two months ago, with the sharp endings to each movement. The troll stopped and his whole body shook in a momentary tremor, but other than that, it didn't have that much effect on it. "Bloody hell!" he yelled in anger. He'd already successfully tried the spell on Dean during their practice, he _knew_ he could pull it off.

Beside him, Ron had gotten his wits about him (finally). " _Flipendo_!" he yelled, the spell that Quirrell had been trying to teach them for the past month without that much success. The troll swayed and fell on its arse, but it didn't look even remotely dazed, only very angry.

Growling in frustration, Harry lunged himself at the monster, trying to smack its ugly head and do some bodily damage. He ended up sticking his wand in the troll's nose, to his utter horror, though it did provide a fabulous opportunity. Surely lighting a fire in the monster's nose would knock it out. If only the stupid thing wouldn't be trying to shake him – and the pain Harry's wand was no doubt already causing the dumb creature – off.

"Harry, look out!" Ron's voice yelled out just as Harry was preparing to cast _Incendio_ , for which he didn't need all that wand-waving, just an up and a down movement. In the last moment, he saw the troll's big club descending straight at his head. He only had enough time to register it would hurt, but not even to think of how to avoid it.

" _Wingardium Leviosa_!"

The club stopped its downward momentum as it touched Harry's untameable hair, and he didn't waste any more time, trusting Ron to hold the spell at least long enough for him to get off.

" _Incendio_!" he yelled out, feeling the magic course through his holly and phoenix feather wand. Pulling the wand out of the monster's nose, he couldn't have rolled off the troll's head faster than he did, knowing well enough that the moment he conjured flames, no matter how weak they were (they hadn't actually learned the spell yet, he'd looked it up in advance for pranking purposes), they would cause a great deal of pain to the troll.

A scream of agony, followed by a loud clunk, then an earth-shuddering thud, told him they'd managed to subdue the troll. Breathing heavily and swaying as he climbed to his feet slowly, Harry inspected their handiwork past the cracked glass of his lenses – the troll was face-down on the ground, that club of its by its head, and smoke coming out of its nostrils. No doubt Ron's hold over the spell he'd been failing that morning had worn off. Harry barely registered that it could have been his own head it would have fallen on, had he not been as fast as he was.

"Did you light its nose on fire?" Ron breathed out, sounding half-awed, half-terrified.

"I think I did," Harry answered, blinking hard and trying to process it.

"Is it... dead?" Granger's shaky voice called out.

"I don't think so," he replied, peering at it carefully; the glasses were broken enough that he was having difficulties with his stupid vision. The troll still seemed to be breathing. "I think it's just been knocked out." He looked down at his wand, belatedly remembering where it had accidentally gotten stuck not moments before, and to his disgust, it was covered with lumpy grey glue-like substance. "Urgh, troll bogies." Bending down, he started wiping it against the troll's trousers, wondering momentarily how it was that something as stupid as a troll could figure out how to make clothes.

He was about half-way finished when the door burst open, and four adults came running into the room, only to stop short when they perceived the scene. Looking around himself, Harry finally took in the full scope of this little adventure – the toilet was completely destroyed, stalls ripped out of their stands and flung one into another, porcelain pieces of smashed sinks littering the floor, Hermione still on the ground looking a right mess, Ron standing in front of her with his wand out, pale and wide-eyed, and Harry himself, cool as a cucumber, dusty from the debris and with glasses broken, bending over the great big monster of a troll and wiping his wand off its pants leg.

Giving the professors a sheepish smile, he straightened up. Professor McGonagall was in the front, looking completely livid, and beside her was regal-looking Professor Slora, the two of them blocking Flitwick's view of the room. Bringing up the rear was willowy Quirrell, who took one look at the troll, let out a faint whimper and sat down on the only toilet still standing, hand flying up to clutch his heart.

"What on earth were you thinking of?" McGonagall said with cold fury colouring her voice. "You're lucky you weren't killed. Why aren't you in your dormitory?"

"Please, Professor McGonagall, they were looking for me."

"Miss Granger!"

Hermione had gotten to her feet. She was still shaking slightly, but her eyes were no longer teary.

"I went looking for the troll because I... I thought I could deal with it on my own – you know, because I've read all about them."

Ron dropped his wand hand and turned to stare open-mouthed at her, and Harry felt about as gobsmacked as his best mate seemed to be. She was _lying_ , to a _teacher_? _For them_? Didn't she hate them?

"If they hadn't found me, I'd be dead now. Ron knocked it to its knees with the Knockback Jinx, and Harry stuck his wand up its nose and cast _Incendio_ , and then Ron knocked it out with its own club. They didn't have time to come and fetch anyone. It was about to finish me off when they arrived."

Harry tried to pull off a poker face and not show how shocked he was to hear her say this, but it didn't really matter all that much, because Slora had stepped in front of McGonagall to look down at the troll and the wisps of smoke still coming out of its nose.

"You lit the troll's nasal cavity on fire?" she repeated in obvious disbelief.

"Erm, yeah," Harry answered, shuffling on his feet and deciding on a whim that it was better they didn't know how his wand had _accidentally_ ended up there when he'd decided to stupidly _tackle_ the monster. "The other spells didn't really work."

"Which ones did you try?" Flitwick asked from where he'd approached Hermione to see if he could get her to calm down a bit.

"I tried _Rictusempra_ , and Ron tried _Flipendo_. I don't really know why they didn't work. Oh, and _Wingardium Leviosa_ , but Ron did that on the club, not the troll, knocked it out."

Flitwick gave Ron a piercing look, but didn't say anything as McGonagall finally took back the reigns of this conversation.

"Miss Granger, you foolish girl, how could you think of tackling a mountain troll on your own?" Hermione hung her head, clearly trying to avoid both McGonagall's and Flitwick's sharp looks. "Five points from Ravenclaw for this," she continued, looking at Flitwick, who only nodded in confirmation. "I am very disappointed in you. Are you hurt?"

 _Now_ she thought to ask that, Harry thought to himself. Just like Sirius. It made him wonder if all adults had such skewered concepts of what was important, or just wizarding ones. Dean's story of growing up with Muggles rarely held stuff like this.

Hermione shook her head mutely, still looking down.

"I will take over their detention, then," Slora stated. "You, Miss Granger, for being foolish enough to think the troll an easy opponent, and you, Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, for not getting adult help and rushing into a dangerous situation so carelessly."

"That might be best," McGonagall agreed.

"The coming Saturday, at ten o'clock promptly."

Well, damn. That would mean missing Quidditch practice.

"Come, let's take you back to the Ravenclaw Tower," Flitwick said, gently steering Granger past everyone else towards the door. "Warm food will do you good."

As she passed them, Hermione looked at the two boys with gratitude, and Harry returned the sentiment with a small smile, thinking all the while that he'd not even known how great she was, really, and that he and the guys needed to apologise to her for everything – the least they owed her. When the two were gone, McGonagall turned to Harry and Ron.

"Well... while it seems you thought on your feet, I still say you were more than lucky. Not many first-years could have taken on a full-grown mountain troll. Really, lighting the inside of its head on fire. You each win Gryffindor five points, and be assured that Professor Dumbledore will be informed of this. You may go now."

The two boys were almost past the toilet door, when McGonagall called after Harry, who turned a questioning look back at his Head of House. From what he could tell, there was a wry smile on her face, and she'd extended her left hand towards him.

"Your glasses, Mr Potter."

"Oh," Harry murmured, blinking in remembrance; of course he couldn't see anything, his stupid glasses were broken. Again. This was the fifth time this year, and there were still two months to go.

He took them off, very careful not to dislodge any of the glass, and carefully placed them in McGonagall's weathered hand, saying all the while: "I know how to do it myself. Mrs Snape taught me for my birthday."

He couldn't really see, but he thought McGonagall was smiling more widely now.

"Ah, yes, Lily is an excellent judge of practical gifts. _Oculus Reparo_. There we go."

"Thank you, Professor."

"You are welcome, Mr Potter. Run along now."

Harry caught up to Ron as soon as he could see properly again, and the two boys hurried back to the dorm, not stopping until they were two floors up. The lack of that awful smell was a relief, at least, even if Harry's heart was still beating to a marching drum.

"That was close," Ron said beside him, exhaling in his own relief. "We should have gotten more than ten points. And detention!"

"I thought you didn't want to fight the troll," Harry replied, grinning like a mad man. "But, seriously, Remus would have given me a smacking for being so reckless; detention is nothing. What's far more important: what was that with Granger at the end?"

"Good of her to get us out of trouble like that," Ron agreed. "Maybe she's not as bad as all that."

"Definitely not, if she wanted to lie for us after calling us bullies. Besides, if she hadn't lain into you about proper pronunciation, I'd have been dead in there."

"Don't have to rub it in, mate," his friend grumbled as they stepped in front of the Fat Lady. "Pig snout."

"Look," Harry said once the door opened, "all I'm saying is that your Charms do need a little polishing, so why not let the know-it-all help? Do you know any other Ravenclaw that would even want to? And to be fair, we _were_ being rude to her all this time. We made her cry, for Merlin's sake; I never wanted to do _that_! We need to apologise, all of us."

"Fine," Ron yelled, waving his hands up in surrender. "I'll apologise to her tomorrow."

"Good," Harry agreed with a nod just as Dean and Seamus spotted them and approached, each holding a plate filled with food.

"Oi, what happened to ye two?" Seamus asked, mouth half-filled with chewed food.

"Yeah, why do you smell like that?" Dean agreed, plugging his nose with his fingers.

"We had to save Hermione Granger from the troll," Ron answered, stepping into the room more fully.

"You what?!" the other two exclaimed as one, and within moments, the four were surrounded by everyone else, demanding to know what had happened. Ron and Harry took turns explaining everything, building up the dramatic suspense around the whole 'lighting its nose on fire' part, and by the time everyone had dropped from exhaustion, the whole tower knew just what heroics the two had pulled. The Junior Marauders had no doubt that by tomorrow, the whole school would be aware of it.


	13. Ch 12: The Hallowe'en Aftermath

**Chapter 12: The Hallowe'en Aftermath**

Later, after the children had been safely ensconced in their quarters and the troll disposed of, Minerva found her way to the Headmaster's office, the entrance located on the second floor this time, at the end of the same corridor in which she'd found the children with the troll. Thankfully, Albus was already there, seated at his desk and apparently writing out some correspondence, though he did give her a welcoming look when she walked in.

"I have no words for tonight, Albus, no words!" she told him, her ire still high, fuelled by sheer terror that even briefly remembering the scene brought on. "Three students almost died tonight!"

The Headmaster gave her a patient look, returning his quill to the inkwell and threading his fingers together on the desk.

"And the scene! Harry Potter was _wiping his wand_ off the troll's clothes! Because he'd stuck it in its _nose_! And then lit the troll on fire! The whole bathroom was smashed to bits, Hermione Granger looked like she was about to fall into shock, and there he was, calm as you please, as if this was the greatest adventure of his life!"

"Indeed," Albus replied, sounding far too amused for her liking, mostly because it provoked a hysterical laugh out of her that she did her best to stifle.

Finally, exhausted with the yelling, she dropped herself into Albus' ugly but quite comfortable chair and rubbed her forehead to relieve the tension headache she'd developed.

"These children will chase me to an early grave, Albus, and you with them," she told him, feeling every one of her fifty-six years. Her boss, forty-five years her senior, offered a conciliatory sherbet lemon, to which she just rolled her eyes in exasperation. "Can you, please, be serious for one minute?"

"Very well. I am pleased to hear that the children were not hurt, and I trust that you have assigned adequate rewards for their behaviour."

"Rewards?!" It took her only a moment to calm her outrage enough to notice Albus' mad eye-twinkle, the one that meant he was teasing her. "Albus, for heaven's sake! They could have been killed!"

"Minerva, my dear, when was the last year that a student couldn't have been killed in this school?"

Which, blast him, he had a point; Hogwarts was one of the safest environments for children in Wizarding Britain, but it had its fair share of danger, troll variety and otherwise. If she truly stopped to think about it, there was a good chance she would simply quit her job and find less stressful employment.

"In all seriousness, Albus, what happened tonight should not have been possible. The last time a troll stumbled upon Hogwarts, let alone managed to get _inside_ it, was when I was a girl."

"You are right, of course," the Headmaster answered, inclining his head in acquiescence. "Which is why I believe that this was no accident."

"Premeditated? You suspect someone in the school?" It took no effort at all to put the pieces together, and she narrowed her eyes at him in displeasure. "The Philosopher's Stone. Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore! Have you finally gone completely barmy, old man?! This is a school housing over seven hundred _children_!"

"I am perfectly aware," Albus replied dryly. "Just as I am aware of the fact that, had the troll been where we were informed it was, no children would have stumbled upon it in the first place."

"Quirinus?" Minerva asked in mild disbelief. "Albus, he is a stuttering wreck. For Merlin's sake, he _fainted_ in the middle of the Great Hall!"

"And yet, he is the one whose devised defence of the Stone is a troll, who informed us of _this_ troll's presence in the dungeons, and whose movements we do not know from his fainting spell to you finding the troll incapacitated."

"Didn't Horace stay with him?"

"He did, until Quirinus woke up. But after that, Kyla came to fetch him, as she'd been informed that Miss Granger had been missing from the feast, and so needed to go track her down. After that, Horace went to supervise his Snakes, as Quirinus assured him that he was perfectly all right and that fainting is nothing uncommon to him since his trip to Albania. When did he join you, then?"

"I checked on the dog as you requested; it was in a right fit, Albus, nearly took my leg off, but I managed to get out of the way of one of its heads. I didn't notice anything in or near the corridor, but I have to admit I was somewhat shaken by the close call, so I might not have paid as close attention as I should have on my way back. I ran into Kyla and Filius – she'd searched him out after getting Horace to go look after their students – just in time for us to hear the frankly heart-stopping crashing from the second floor. By the time we reached the toilet and entered, the troll was down, and Quirinus was right behind us. I have to assume that he joined us somewhere from the point of us meeting together to us reaching the scene."

"Hm."

"But, Albus, we know Quirinus; for Merlin's sake, I taught him for seven years, and worked beside him for another five. Granted, he's never really stuttered before his leave, but I simply can't imagine–"

But she cut herself off, because she'd thought that same thing once before, ten years ago, and everything had fallen down around her, could have gone even worse if not for people more intelligent and persistent than she taking reigns of the situation. She didn't _truly_ know Quirinus, just like she'd not truly known Peter Pettigrew, no matter that she'd taught them both for years and worked with them afterwards. And it was also true that Quirinus had changed, drastically, from that too-eager youth who'd held himself a little too high for his peers' liking.

So, perhaps Quirinus really was the thief so fixated on the Philosopher's Stone. Certainly he was bright enough to be able to think of a way to break into Gringotts without getting caught. And Albus was right; the Cerberus wasn't the only dangerous thing they had in the bowels of the school.

"Is it the same troll as the one from downstairs?"

"It cannot be," Albus answered, "though I've not gone to check yet. You and Severus are the only ones who know the full layout of the protections, and Quirinus' is quite a ways from the entrance. No, I believe it would have been far easier to bring another troll into the castle than to extract the one already present, especially for a diversion that wasn't very time-consuming."

"So, what will you do about it?"

"For now, I will do nothing."

"Albus," she warned, and had the satisfaction of seeing him sigh.

"I will do nothing as the headmaster of Hogwarts," he amended. "Our assessment still stands; I don't believe him to be a danger to children, Harry's encounter with the troll notwithstanding. Furthermore, I have little proof on the matter, and firing him would require me to involve the Board and the Council, as I would need to find an adequate substitute for the rest of the year."

"But, as the head of the Order?" she prompted him.

"As the head of the Order, I will have someone collect the proof we need," he promised. "In any case, tonight's events allow me the leeway I needed to fulfil Sirius' insistence on having an Auror present at the school for a while without too many inconvenient questions being raised."

"Oh, wonderful," Minerva answered with weary exasperation. "Exactly what we need."

"Just for a little while," he assured her. "It will serve to make the thief weary enough not to attempt anything in the near future, will give us the time we need to determine if Quirinus is, indeed, the thief, and will hopefully assuage the torrent of letters and Howlers that will be coming our way as soon as the first owls fly out tonight."

"Merlin, I'd completely forgotten about that."

"At least it won't be like the April Fools' Day of 1989," Albus said cheerily, and Minerva almost moaned at the thought (she didn't, in fact, release any sort of sound, because she still had her dignity, and this was certainly not the moment when she would lose it, but that event was not one she wished to remember if she could help it).

"If you _ever_ dump your correspondence on me again like that, Albus, I will kill you in your sleep so creatively that no one will ever suspect I even had the thought."

"Duly noted."

"Oh, and one more thing," she said, remembering why she'd come to yell at him in the first place. "The next time you need to insure that a diversion works, do not, for the love of Merlin's beard, involve the children in it the way you did today."

"Had I known the troll was not where Quirinus had said it would be, I would have kept the children in the Great Hall," he tried to assure her. She wasn't assured.

"Where they would have been a great deal safer in either case," Minerva pointed out sharply. "Albus, you told me once to rein you in if I thought you were pulling strings again. This is me reining you in. I understand the need to catch the culprit, but not at the cost of risking children's lives. That troll could have run into any number of students on their way to the dormitories, and not many have the fortitude to not panic in cases such as this. That Potter and Weasley had enough sense to incapacitate it speaks far more towards their recklessness and home lives than it does to our DADA education, such as it's been for years now."

For a moment, he looked like that sherbet lemon he loved so much finally let him know how sour it was, before he seemed to accept her words, if grudgingly, which was as much as she could expect from him.

"Severus will agree with you, I believe, when Evan tells him of the illogicality of my actions this evening," he offered, the unspoken apology implicit in the words.

"Oh?" Minerva replied, more than a little intrigued by this turn of events, and quite willing to hear a little gossip. Her summoning of tea for the two of them was her way of accepting the apology, and she knew Albus would understand. "He is quite a bright boy, though he doesn't seem to have an aptitude for Transfiguration."

"A potioneering prodigy, however," Albus pointed out.

"Like his father. Merlin help that girl with the two of them," she answered with a smile; for all his general disagreeableness, Minerva had known Severus' mind for what it had been back when he'd been a student, and she had her own share of regrets when it came to that particular generation. She had no doubt Lily was more than happy to have her two boys obsessed with potions as they were, though she did privately decide to see about maybe inviting her for an afternoon tea and some gossipy conversation. It had been a while since she'd more than exchanged a few lines here and there with the young woman.

She spent the rest of the evening in pleasant conversation with Albus on the topic of former students, trusting Aurora to handle her Deputy Head duties even after such an eventful feast and quite happy to escape what had to be a headache of wrangling a hundred and more overexcited children to bed. As for herself, she found herself easily slipping into sleep that night, secure in the knowledge that for all his foolishness, Harry was well equipped, even at eleven years of age, of handling whatever life was throwing at him, a skill she knew he would direly need if the future Albus was predicting came true.

* * *

Ron found Hermione in the library after classes the very next day after the Troll Incident. Harry had badgered him about apologising throughout the morning, until Ron had assured him that he did actually want to do it. He still didn't like her very much, but a part of him felt ashamed of what he'd called her. His mother had raised him better, and both Percy _and_ Fred and George had certainly given him an earful when they'd found out why she'd been in danger in the first place.

So, he swallowed his pride and approached her. Luckily, she was alone, reading some book or other, something he suspected was her default state. Taking a deep breath, he stepped closer, until his shadow fell over the book and she looked up, frowning when she recognised him.

"Erm..." he started, thinking feverishly of the best way to say it. Naturally, what actually came out was not even close to perfect. "IwantedtosaysorryforwhatIsaidtheotherdayandforputtingyouindangerforit."

"Huh?" the girl replied, blinking owlishly at him.

"I said," he repeated, cheeks burning in humiliation, "that I'm sorry for what I said and for putting you in danger."

"Oh. Well... I'm sorry for whatever it is that made you angry in Charms," she replied, her face slowly tinging pink. "But you were doing it wrong."

"That's what made me angry!" he exclaimed, the old indignation coming back. " _It_ _'_ _s Wing-_ gar _-dium Levi-_ o - _sa, make the_ gar _sound nice and long_. You don't have to be so patronising all the time!"

"But I wasn't," Hermione replied, looking bewildered. "I was just trying to help!"

"I didn't ask for your help!"

"But that's why we're supposed to work in pairs!" she insisted. "So that we help each other!"

"Well..." That actually brought Ron up short, because he'd never really thought of it like that. Stupid charms weren't his forte, Harry was the one who was good at that wand-waving stuff. Of course, Ron wasn't sure that he was good at anything at all, really, so that wasn't much consolation. Those charms Harry had shown him in the past few months were interesting, which was why he'd practiced them until he was sure he could do them. The Levitation Charm, on the other hand, hadn't been even remotely interesting or useful until he'd actually managed it last night. "Just... I'll ask for help, don't go rubbing my nose with how much better you are."

"But you asked me to do it myself!" He did, hadn't he?

"Well, I didn't actually mean it like that, I was just angry."

"All right," Hermione accepted, still looking somewhat confused. "All right, fine. Did you get into trouble for, you know, yesterday? Other than the detention, that is."

"No, we got ten points for saving you... er, thanks for, erm, lying for us, by the way."

"I... well, you did save me," she laughed nervously, obviously trying to brush it away is unimportant, before her eyes flew somewhere behind Ron. "Anyway, I should really get going."

Frowning at her sudden departure, Ron turned around to look at the reason and got an unpleasant surprise in the form of the greasy Slytherin they all loved to hate. Snape was standing in the very front of the isle, holding two books in his hands and observing them with a scrutinising expression on his face. Hurriedly, Hermione picked up her things and walked over to the boy.

"Was he bothering you?" the Slytherin boy asked the Ravenclaw girl, shooting Ron a nasty glare.

"No, he just came by to apologise."

"Didn't know he'd have it in him."

"Don't be rude, Evan," Hermione said as they disappeared from view. "Harry and Ron aren't all that..." but by the end of the sentence, they were too far for Ron to catch which adjective she'd used for them. Clenching his teeth, he marched out of the library in search of his friends, suddenly feeling an urge to see the Slytherin boy squirm.

* * *

"Not all that bad?" Evan repeated, staring at her. " _Not all that bad?_ Hermione, they are bullies!"

"Look," she replied, exasperated with him. Really, he was too stubborn for his own good most of the time. "Ron was horrible to me. But he and Harry came to save me from the troll, didn't they? Harry could have died yesterday, you know, the troll almost hit him over the head with the club."

"And they came to save you only because they were directly responsible for it."

"To be fair, I overreacted," she admitted, blushing in shame. "I mean, it was nothing new, after all, he's been saying that ever since the train. And the other Ravenclaws aren't all that bad now that I'm trying not to talk about everything I know, but I was really only trying to help him. He was so frustrated, yelling it out _wrong_."

"He does everything wrong," Evan said, peaking sideways at her through his greasy hair. "And it's not because he's stupid, it's because he just doesn't want to try. If he spent the time that he does trying to sabotage the Slytherins in Potions on his own brewing, he might actually be descent. He's a bully, Mi. They all are, the _Junior Marauders_." He couldn't help himself from spitting the name out like it was the most disgusting thing in the world, she'd noticed.

"Well, I still don't think they are irredeemable."

"You're off your rocker, then."

"Evan Stephen Snape!" Hermione exclaimed, smacking his shoulder. "I won't spend my time with you if you're rude to me!"

"Sorry," he replied, immediately sounding repentant. "I didn't mean anything by it, just that I don't think you can trust them. I wouldn't, not in a million years, not even if they started treating me like their best mate."

"Well, I'm not you," she replied, lifting her chin stubbornly. "And Ron may be horrible, but Harry's all right."

"Oh, not you too!" Evan moaned. "What is it with girls and Potterprat?"

"That has nothing to do with it!" Hermione exclaimed, indignant. "I don't like him like that!"

"You just think you don't."

"Don't you put words in my mouth," she snapped back. "I don't like anyone like that, I'm _twelve_. And don't go into the whole Parkinson-obsessed-with-Malfoy or Parvati-and-Lavender-boytalk things again, or I swear I will hit you. Seriously, aren't there more important things in life than romance?"

Evan snorted in answer, so she smiled. The whole thing irritated her to no end, the thinking that because they were girls, they were automatically obliged to think of boys in a romantic way, which didn't even make any sense to her right now. Sure, her parents loved each other, and she knew there was more to romance than simply spending time together (she read more than just textbooks, after all), but she simply didn't see any interest in it at this point in time.

"I'm glad at least someone thinks like I do," her friend agreed. "I'm just glad the guys in my dorm don't even know the names of girls in our year, let alone talk hours on end about them."

"Sometimes you have it so easy," Hermione decided with a sigh. "Now, that non-sequitur aside, let's get one thing straight, all right? If I want to not be at war with them, that's my business, and I will be angry if you try to stop me."

"You should have been a Gryffindor, you're too bossy for your own good," Evan muttered, but by his slumped posture, Hermione could tell that he'd drop it. Good. She knew the three boys hated each other, but she didn't want that to factor into _her_ friendships with them. They seated themselves at the Ravenclaw table, a sight that was slowly becoming familiar to those who ate lunch late, and there weren't very many of those, Hermione was grateful to note. The seating in the school may have become extremely lax over the reformation years when it came to House affiliation, but the Slytherins hadn't taken Evan's friendship with her very well, what with all that stupid whose-parents-are-magical crap, and as much as she hated having to mind it, she and Evan had agreed not to be seen together too often. It was insulting, to be honest, but she thought that after two months, she knew Evan well enough to accept that this was the way Slytherins saw it. Luckily, the library was large enough that they could hide in one corner or the other without being noticed too much.

Once they'd filled their plates, Evan turned to another matter that had her instant attention. "There's something I wanted to speak with you about. Yesterday, when Quirrell first informed us of the troll loose in the school, Dumbledore had us all move to our dorms."

Frowning, Hermione looked at him. It was something she already knew, considering she'd found everyone in the Ravenclaw Tower already, but until Evan had stated it like that, she hadn't given it any thought. Now, though, she could see the flaw in the logic.

"That's just stupid," she decided. "Why would he do that?"

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I swear he knew how stupid it was, but he did it anyway. It was too deliberate to be senility or something."

"So he needed students moved. Is there something in the Great Hall we all aren't allowed to know about?"

"Not that I can think of. Besides, it wasn't Dumbledore who let the troll in. He could have just done it at night, when everyone slept. He is the headmaster of the school, after all."

"So who did let the troll in, then?" Hermione mused. "And if they did that as a distraction, then it has to mean Dumbledore knew it from the start, or he would have just left everyone at the Great Hall."

"I think it has something do to with the third floor corridor that's off bounds," Evan said.

"Do we know what's there?"

"When someone tells me to keep away on pain of death, I tend to listen to their advice," the boy deadpanned, making Hermione roll her eyes.

"I wasn't suggesting we go see what's there, I just wondered if you'd heard anything about it."

"Not from any of the Slytherins."

"I didn't, either, from the Ravenclaws," she couldn't keep the disappointment from her voice.

"Well, if anyone had gone sniffing about that floor, it would be the Gryffindors, and they wouldn't tell us anything, so that's another dead end."

"But we can agree that it most likely has to do with the third floor?" she checked, and Evan nodded. "So who could have let the troll in?"

"Teachers, upper year students, Peeves," Evan started counting, "anyone from the Board of Governors of the Council of Supervisors, someone completely unrelated at all..."

"Well, that narrows it down," Hermione quipped dryly. "Let's say that Dumbledore recognised the incident for what it was – a distraction. Who do we _know_ couldn't have used the distraction?"

"The prefects, they were in charge of escorting all the students through the castle. I suppose most of the students, but I didn't see any Slytherins managing to sneak out, the whole thing was too organised on our end."

"I'd just say skip students completely. I don't see how any student could have gotten a _troll_ on such short notice."

Evan snorted and agreed. "So, Peeves? He'd have been there to watch, and he has no need to go to the third floor anyway, so I don't see Dumbledore reacting like this if Peeves had been responsible. Teachers?"

"Everyone who was at the feast couldn't have done it," Hermione reasoned. "So, who can we discount?"

"Hermione, are you forgetting one little thing?" Evan asked, raising his eyebrow. When she gave him a confused frown in response, he sighed. "Muggle-borns. Magic, Mi, magic. Not many things are impossible with magic. You can't discount anyone."

"Fine," she replied, annoyed by his comment on her parentage. "Excuse me for thinking logically. Not discount, then, just put into 'less likely' category."

"The four Heads of Houses were there, and Dumbledore, of course. That loony Divinations professor was there as well; Sinistra and Hooch, they were quite loud, actually; the twins, I saw them also, and they were talking to Professor Slora; Kleinschusters were there, too. I think that's about it. Quirrell ran in yelling about the troll, then passed out, Doctor Ajax isn't in the school, I heard him talking to that professor who organises all the excursions about being a guest lecturer this week, you know he's like a visiting professor at Oxford, which is really impressive considering he's a wizard." Hermione actually grinned at his verbal diarrhoea, deciding that he'd been holding his thoughts in for too long and that it would be better to just let him get it all out of his system. "Then there's that half-eaten professor of Magical Creatures who doesn't come down to the Great Hall if it's not the first and the last feast of the year, but I hardly see how he'd benefit, he doesn't even have legs to go to the third floor with. Which, admittedly, doesn't mean much, my mum can fly with a charm, but then that's Charms Mastery level, and I somehow don't see anyone but Flitwick or Dumbledore able to pull it off."

"Fly? As in, levitate? Or actually fly?"

"Actually fly," Evan replied, grinning. "Dad can, too; she taught him."

"Did she teach you?"

In response, he snorted. "Have you not heard me in the last two months about how I'm pants at wandwork? She seems to think I'll manage it with age, but privately, I'm very sure that'll never, ever happen. In any case, is that all? I don't know about the others."

"That leaves Vector, Math; Bathsheda Babbling, Magical Theory; Birdwhistle, Histories; Will Florrel, Science; and Georgie Spinnet, she's the one who does the excursions."

"And Quirrell, don't forget about him."

"But I thought he was the one to inform everyone about the troll."

"Sure, but he wasn't in my line of sight for most of the night beforehand. It's unlikely, but it just seems sloppy not to count him in."

"Point," Hermione agreed. "What about the Board of Governors?"

"The only two I know of are Lucius Malfoy and Regulus Black, but there are twelve, and they all have access to the school. Plus the Council of Supervisors, there's twelve of them as well, and my mum's one of them. The only other one I know of is Davis' dad. Granted, I don't know if they can just sneak in whenever without Dumbledore knowing."

"But then that's a moot point, isn't it, when Dumbledore knew someone was trying to create a diversion. For all we know, it could have been one of them and Dumbledore was trying to figure out whom."

"That's it!" Evan exclaimed, sitting up straight and nearly spilling his pumpkin juice. "That's why he allowed the whole thing to become so chaotic, because he didn't know who it was that wanted to get to the third floor! So he had to have had someone waiting there to see who'd come."

"Sure, but we can't know that, and we can't go around randomly asking people either. And why would anyone want to go somewhere they could possibly die in the first place?"

Evan shrugged. "We can't know that until we figure out what's so dangerous out there."

"All right, but Evan, why would anything dangerous be there? It's a _school_ , it's supposed to be safe."

"You have a very strange concept of magical schools," he observed, making Hermione roll her eyes at him. "My mum's really good school friend is a werewolf, and Dumbledore let him attend school for seven years; that was before the Ministry assigned money for the Wolfsbane Potion and allowed werewolf kids to attend, so it was done in secret and was illegal, technically. Quidditch is a sport played hundreds of feet in the air on brooms, with balls that want to do you serious bodily harm. Half of the spells they teach us are designed to cause damage. We are allowed to play with volatile substances every week. How does that translate to 'supposed to be safe'?"

"All right, I get it," she grumbled. Really, this wasn't mentioned when Professor McGonagall had first come to inform them of her placement in April. "Even so, none of that spells certain death, which was what Dumbledore said would happen if we went to the third floor. So, why have it there?"

"For safekeeping?" Now Hermione could see that he was just throwing out random stuff for amusement. "I don't know, that's your department!"

But his words had turned on her mental light. "No, you've just said it, Evan! They are keeping something safe, something that's so valuable they had to install such dangerous measures. And that would explain why anyone would want to go there in the first place, to get whatever's hidden."

"Great, now all we have to know is what it is. Should I ask Dad for help? He's close with Dumbledore."

"He'd just tell you to drop it," Hermione replied. "My parents always do, anyway. They think that I'm too young to think of those things."

"My dad doesn't, but then I've never thought about secret Dumbledore stuff either. Well, I'll just write to him about the old man doing something supposedly stupid and say I'm suspicious. That should get him involved at least."

"Why would you want to involve him?"

"Well, if whatever's hidden is so important that they have something that dangerous guarding it, then we can assume that whoever wants to get it is very dangerous too. And this is a school, as you said."

Hermione snorted at that and stood up, shaking her head at him.

"You are possibly the only other logical person around," she decided, quite pleased that she'd made friends with him that day in the library. Really, the complete lack of common sense in most things magic was starting to drive her crazy. Or perhaps it was just that, in the Muggle world, logic was all there was. When you grew up surrounded by impossible things, you tended to stop thinking of the world as 'logical'.

* * *

Watching Hermione walk out of the hall, Evan smiled to himself slightly, pleased that he was right as to which person could be of most assistance in this matter. Hermione tended to talk everyone's ear off about things she knew or had read, but she really didn't mean anything by it. As someone who shared her enjoyment in learning things from books, he didn't mind too much.

Picking up his backpack, Evan rose from the table and started walking towards the dungeons, thinking on the way about Weasley's apology to the Ravenclaw girl. Evan didn't know him very well, he was much closer to Ginny and even the twins, but the other boy didn't strike him as someone who could easily admit to being wrong. It made him wonder if the apology was actually sincere, or if they were trying to gain something by befriending her.

While she claimed that Potter was better, Evan simply couldn't see it. Potter was more self-absorbed than Weasley, and that did make him less inclined to looking at others' faults, true, but he'd obviously agreed wholeheartedly with everything the other three boys had dished out regarding Hermione. Not that Evan had heard them speaking about her at all – they were in three different houses, it wasn't likely that they'd be in the same places together for him to hear something like it – but he didn't see how the leader of the Junior Marauders could be any better than the rest.

His foot stuck on something and with a yelp, Evan went sprawling face-first on the stone floor, his backpack flying far out of his reach. Pain flared up through his stinging palms up his arms from throwing them out to break his fall, and he cursed himself for being so clumsy.

Only when he tried to scramble to his feet did the Slytherin realise that it hadn't been an uneven stone he'd tripped over, but a foot, one belonging to an unfriendly looking Gryffindor boy. Said Gryffindor boy was part of a group of four that was now surrounding Evan. Harry bloody Potter and his posse.

He tried to surreptitiously reach for his wand, but they must have been paying close attention to it after the last time, Potter sent a sticking spell at Evan's wand pocket, effectively sealing the weapon within it and cutting off the Slytherin's access for however long it took the spell to wear off.

Shit.

"That water balloon in your bed was me," he said, trying for cool and knowing he was failing miserably but doing it anyway. "I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did." It wasn't, of course, it was Fred and George, but he had no problem taking false credit if it would piss Potter off.

"Oh, no, this is practice," Potter answered. "Ron's Knockback Jinx didn't work on the troll properly, so he wanted to practice."

"Lucky me," Evan muttered in response, trying to scramble to his feet even as he glared at their ringleader. "Though you're getting better at lying, Potter, I'll give you that. Not good enough, but better. So why are you really bothering yourselves with li'l ol' me?"

Weasley, looking almost enraged, pulled him by his tie, nearly cutting off his breathing.

"Hermione is a decent person, she doesn't need to be influenced by your..."

"Slytherinness?" Evan quipped, trying not to show how out of breath he was becoming. "And it's so nice that you noticed she was a decent person, it only took you, oh, two months? It's more than can be said for you, in any case."

In response, Weasley pushed him into the floor, hard enough Evan's elbows got scraped lightly through his shirt and his back landed against his backpack.

"You stay away from her, Snape."

"Like you'll tell me what to do," Evan shot back, trying to right himself into sitting position and failing when one of the others – Finnigan, but he wasn't sure – pulled him by the collar. "Or her for that matter. And what's it to you anyway?"

"We fully believe Snakes have nothing to do slithering about Eagles..." Finnigan said, drawling slightly, as if it had just crossed his mind.

"Or Badgers or Lions, for that matter," Thomas finished. "Stick with your own crowd."

In spite of knowing how bad an idea that might be, Evan rolled his eyes, finally managing to right himself properly.

"Would that be the brainy-over-brawny, the brilliant potioneers, the privileged Pure-bloods, or the morally superior crowd? Because you know, I belong to several different ones."

Weasley's face twisted into an ugly grimace, and he shoved Evan backwards; the greasy-haired boy had seen him do it a few times with his elder brothers, so he was already shifting to compensate and keep his balance, though the force behind the shove was surprisingly considerable. In retaliation, Evan smacked his hands away and shoved back, making Weasley stumble.

"Haven't you heard of oppression of women?" he continued, pissed at himself and at them and at the whole situation he'd found himself in. If they were going to try and push him around, then he was going to give as good as he got. And though he wanted to yell, Evan chose to be snide and cutting instead; yelling was disturbingly Gryffindor-like, and anyway, he was much better with sarcasm and sharp words. "I'm not sure she'd approve of your thinking, you know. Especially after you spent the whole time you knew her insulting her and wishing she'd just disappear. Isn't she a bossy bushy-haired know-it-all bookworm to you, Weasley?"

Since it seemed that he was the one to instigating the attack, Evan had decided to address him directly. It was a good choice, if only to see his face twist into one of helpless fury.

"You shut your filthy mouth, you Snake!"

Weasley tried shoving him again, and this time his anger lent him enough force that Evan stumbled back, right over an extended foot. He landed on his side straight onto his own backpack, the sharp corner of a thick book jabbing him painfully into the side and knocking the breath out of him, even as his wand slipped out of his pocket a bit to poke his hip, as, apparently, the sticking spell had worn itself out.

Inhaling mightily, he rolled onto his back and looked up at his four attacker, a sneer overtaking his features.

"My, how creative you all are," Evan mocked, though it sounded far less effective when he'd still not gotten his breath back properly. "If you could only think of something that might insult me more than calling me by my house sigil, I might even take you a bit more seriously. But then you obviously all are _such_ Lions."

Potter was the one who attacked him this time, with the Tickling Charm. Evan gasped, then coughed sharply as the sensation combined with the pain in his side and made him swallow his saliva wrong. The uncomfortable physical sensations made tears pool under his eyelids, and Evan found himself grateful for his annoying hair for once in his life, because it hid him from their view.

Potter stopped the spell almost immediately after Evan began coughing, no doubt getting scared of causing actual harm to the Slytherin, and though it was a struggle, Evan didn't let the chance slip – still getting his breath back, he reached for his wand and whipped it at them, pushing himself off the ground with the other hand. His knees were shaky, but they held, so that at least he was upright and with a way to defend himself at his disposal, even if his position wasn't nearly as good as last time – he'd had Stheno with him then, and he'd had the wall behind him. Now, he was surrounded by the four boys, and there was no chance that he could keep all of them in his line of sight.

Judging by their expressions, they knew it as well as he did.

"Oooh, shaking in our boots, we are," Finnigan said with a grin.

"I'll give you–" Evan began, but his voice died as loud laughter rang out from the corridor entrance. Faster than it seemed possible, the four Gryffindors were turning tail and running in the opposite direction, and only the ends of their robes were visible to their Head of House as she entered the space in the company of Professor Elena Kleinschuster.

Their mirth died immediately as both professors assessed the scene, and with only a parting touch to the younger woman's elbow, Professor McGonagall hurried swiftly to Evan, who wasn't quite sure whether it was smarter to look at her or down the corridor where the four boys had vanished.

"What is the meaning of this?" she demanded to know, cold fury in her eyes as she looked beyond him to the other end of the corridor – she must have seen them. "Mr Snape, are you all right?"

"Just peachy, Professor," he replied, finally lowering his wand and wincing when his side protested his position. "Nothing I can't handle."

"You're injured! Come, to the hospital wing with you, and then you'll tell me exactly who did this."

He nearly rolled his eyes – if there was one thing he knew very well, it was how much McGonagall had deliberately overlooked for the Senior Marauders.

"I can handle them."

"It is not your job to handle such things, Mr Snape," she replied, gathering his things with a wave of her wand. "I will not tolerate bullying in my house or i–"

"I'm not in your house, Professor," he bit out, huffing each time he stepped forward with his right leg and his side got jolted. That damned book was going to leave a bruise, he just knew it.

"No, but you are still my student, Mr Snape, and that places you under my purview," she answered, delivering the last word pointedly enough to let him know that this was how she would have finished her sentence, had Evan not cut her off.

"So you saw who it was, then?" he challenged, and she grimaced.

"No," she admitted grudgingly. "But do not think I haven't noticed the antagonism between you and Potter's group. If it was them, you must tell me so that I can do something about it."

"With all due respect, Professor, you certainly did plenty for my father back in the day, so forgive me if I find it all so very doubtful."

That made the old professor stop in her step, so Evan was forced to, as well. When he looked at her, she seemed to have grown considerably older than just a few minutes before.

"It is true that I could have done much more to protect your father," she admitted. "And I am sorry that his time here in any way reflects yours. But I am neither blind nor stupid, Mr Snape. I will not allow history to repeat itself, if you can help me with it."

"I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you. I can handle them, and all you'd do anyway is put them in detention."

"If nothing is done about them now, they will only continue as they have already done."

"You've been trying to stop Fred and George Weasley from mischief for more than two years now, and I don't see them stopping any time soon. Besides, it's not like this most of the time. It's just..." he shifted on his feet to alleviate the pain; it was waning, thankfully. "They seem to have finally noticed Hermione is more than a convenient outlet for their collective frustrations, and now suddenly I'm not allowed to be her friend. As soon as they realise their tactics are useless, they will go back to simple pranking, and there's no harm in that."

"When it is done with malicious intent, there is," McGonagall responded, continuing in her brusque walk towards the hospital wing. "Your father should know about this, however."

"No!" Evan exclaimed, heart rising to his throat at the thought. "No, he'll just do something stupid to Potter's guardian, and Mum will get upset. It's really not that big a deal, honest."

"Very well," the professor conceded with a huff. "But I insist that you inform me if they continue to be openly hostile."

Somehow, Evan didn't feel like he'd convinced her of anything much aside from not telling his dad. While Evan hadn't ever been bullied before, once his accidental magic took care of the first attempt back in primary school, he'd heard more than one advice on the matter from his dad, and he knew the most important thing was that he not be afraid of them. Fear was what they wanted, and he refused to give it to them. He knew potions would take care of his bruise quickly enough, and things like tied shoelaces and spilled ink in his bag were embarrassing, but at most only annoying, and something he could repay in kind. It'd be hard for him to inflict physical injuries on them, true, but this was the first actual attempt of that kind on his person, aside from that time when they'd ambushed him, and, really, he'd gotten away in better health than they did that time. So no, currently, Evan wasn't the least bit afraid of them, and until he was, he had no intention of telling anyone. This was his problem, and he would deal with it alone.

Madam Pomfrey had much the same reaction as Professor McGonagall, but Evan kept mum on the matter, so she could do little else than check for and heal his bruise. He debated briefly on whether to tell Hermione of what had transpired, if only to see if she'd still decide to be friends with them, but in the end his pride won out, and he decided not to. Their friendship was still new enough that he didn't know how she might take it – she was by no means stupid, she'd probably figure out the agenda behind such a thing, and might just be insulted enough to decide to be friends with them to spite him, instead of seeing them as bullies like he wanted her to.

Now all he needed to do was plan his revenge, and won't that be a sweet way to pass the time.

* * *

 _Dear Dad,_

 _I_ _'_ _m certain that you will have heard of this by now (ha! finally found a place to use the future perfect like you taught me), but last night, during the Hallowe_ _'_ _en feast, someone let a troll into the castle. Quirrell ran in half-way through the feast to inform us of it and fainted (he_ _'_ _s a horrible teacher, absolutely rubbish at explaining anything, and I had to ask Hermione for help with the spells, do you know how humiliating that was? I only asked her because I couldn_ _'_ _t very well ask Theo Nott, he_ _'_ _d hold it over my head until eternity. Can_ _'_ _t you get Mum to switch him out? Please, please, please? She won_ _'_ _t listen to_ me _). I thought it wasn_ _'_ _t a very big issue, since we were all required to be in the Great Hall, and there were plenty of teachers to keep guard of the room while a search party went to deal with the troll, but then instead Professor Dumbledore sent us all to our dorms! Well, he sent the Snakes to the library, since the troll was supposed to be in the dungeons in the first place, which it wasn_ _'_ _t, because Hermione almost got killed by it on the second floor. Apparently, freaking Potter **prat** and the Weasel saved her, and now she_ _'_ _s all friendly with them, never mind that she was in the toilet crying because they_ _'_ _d said something nasty to her again. Did you know that he got on the Quidditch team because he deliberately disobeyed Madam Hooch and nearly brained himself in some completely insane move? How is that fair?! Then he fought a troll yesterday, and got ten points for managing to knock it out! Really, if this was how his father was when you were at school, I **really** understand why you hate them all so much. And now Hermione will be just like Mum and insist on being friends with them, and it_ _'_ _s not fair!_

 _Anyway, Hermione and I thought it over, and we think that the Headmaster had done it on purpose, because I_ _'_ _m sure he knew I thought it was stupid, but he did it anyway. Do you know why? Does it have anything to do with the third floor that we were told not to go to unless we wanted to die? That sounds a little dramatic, even for Hogwarts, doesn_ _'_ _t it?_

 _School_ _'_ _s fine. Stheno loved the Hallowe_ _'_ _en feast, she spent half of it watching the bats fly about, though she was smart enough not to try and catch any, like some of the other cats at Hogwarts. She seems to like Professor McGonagall, probably because she is a cat Animagus and they can have all sorts of cat talks, although I think she misses home and being able to taunt the birds from my window. The owls don_ _'_ _t like her very much, but that_ _'_ _s because she picks on them from time to time, especially Potterprat_ _'_ _s flashy one. He has a snowy owl, can you believe that? The only one at Hogwarts. Really, I swear that guy doesn_ _'_ _t know the meaning of the word_ _'_ _subtlety_ _'_ _._

 _I wish Christmas would come sooner; Hogwarts is nice and all, but I really want to go home and sleep in my bed and brew potions with you and watch Sherlock Holmes with Mum. Seven more weeks._

 _Love you,_

 _Evan_

* * *

When Regulus entered the office, Sirius was in the process of finishing the report on his latest case. He acknowledged his baby brother with a brief glance, before completing his final three sentences and signing on the proper spot. Then he tidied the papers up into a bunch and stuck them together in the corner with a charm, before rising from his seat.

"Reg. What brings you here?"

"The troll incident at Hogwarts, of course."

"Ah, that. Harry wrote to tell me all about his little adventure."

Regulus' response was a rather unimpressed raising of an eyebrow. "A _little_ adventure?"

"Oh, stuff it," Sirius told him cheerily as he hunted for that folder jacket with all the other case information. It was somewhere on his desk, he was pretty certain of that much. "He and Ron performed admirably, nobody was hurt. I mean, it's not just anyone who can think of lighting the troll's nose on fire!" he pointed out with some glee. "They saved the Ravenclaw girl, in any case, and the detention they got for it should be more than enough. He's gone to great lengths to complain about having to miss Quidditch practice for it; apparently, it's supervised by Kyla Slora, his Latin professor. D'you know her? I thought that family had died out in the War."

"Kyla Yaxley, yes. Are you telling me that _Harry_ was the one who stopped the troll?"

Pulling up sharply, Sirius reassessed his brother's previous comment.

"You didn't know about any of this, did you?" Fuck; he was far too distracted today if his little brother was conning him out of information with only a single leading comment. "Shit; how much did Dumbledore disclose?"

"Just that a troll had found its way into the school during the Hallowe'en feast, but that it had been contained, and that there were no injuries. In fact, he made it sound so run-of-the-mill, Skeeter hadn't even gotten wind of it. Naturally."

"And I just let the cat out of the bag. Wonderful."

"Do share," Regulus urged with a somewhat frosty tone.

"Not much to the story, really; Quirrell came in half-way through the feast, told everyone about the troll and fainted, the incompetent half-wit that he is, and while the students were migrating to their dorms, Harry and Ron realised that one of the Ravenclaw girls from their year wasn't at the feast. Harry was somewhat less wordy on the subject, but reading between the lines, they've been disparaging the girl louder than they should have, and she'd overhead them."

"How very typical of your child, Siri, to make other kids cry."

Sirius blustered, but let it pass; after all, there wasn't much he could do to excuse Harry's actions on the subject. "Trust me, I've let him know my opinion on the topic. In any case, they ran to get her, and the troll, I'm assuming having smelled them, followed them to the bathroom. After what he described as an epic battle, but I've understood to have been two or three cast spells, he managed to wedge his wand into the troll's nose and cast _Incendio_ , after which Ron clubbed it with its own club, with a spell they'd only recently learned, mind you, Harry was extremely proud of him, and knocked the troll out. After that, their teachers showed up and took care of the situation. They all ended up in detention with Kyla... Yaxley, you said? Are you telling me that there is a _Yaxley_ teaching at the school and I don't know about it?!"

"Which is why she went back to her maiden name after Geffron died," Regulus replied succinctly. "She was Lucius' generation, if I remember correctly."

"And when it comes to _them_ , you always do," Sirius finished for him darkly, still hating that his brother insisted on maintaining his Death Eater connections. " _Why_ did Dumbledore allow a Death Eater wife to teach at Hogwarts, and _how_ is it possible that I'm just now learning about it?"

"She needed a place of refuge due to some family circumstances, most likely tied to what you'd heard about her family dying out during the War – they hadn't, but it's down to her and her cousin's daughter, I think you might have known him, Conall Slora – and as for why you weren't informed, I assume it is because you had better things to do at the time, namely taking Harry in and figuring out how to be a father at twenty-one years of age. She has been at the school roughly since the end of the War. Do not make a fuss over this, Sirius; she is one of the most competent professors on staff, and the Slytherins by far prefer her to Slughorn."

"Fine, but I'll be having words with Dumbledore about it," he assured Regulus as they exited his office and he moved in the direction of Scrimgeour's office.

"It seems that there is a great many occasions when words need to be had with that man."

"Speaking of, you'll be pleased to hear that I received correspondence from him this morning confirming my request for posting an Auror trainee at the school for a week or two."

"Ah; so that's why we're going to your boss' office."

"Yup," Sirius confirmed cheerfully, knocking on the correct door. He twisted the doorknob as soon as his boss called him in, and entered with a rather satisfied, if somewhat tired, air.

"Auror Black," Rufus Scrimgeour, Head of the Auror Office, greeted him, looking up through his spectacles at Sirius. "Mr Black. Do you need something?"

"The report, sir," Sirius offered the folder over Scrimgeour's desk, which the man accepted. He scanned it briefly, most likely to determine which case it was about, before placing it on the pile to his right and turning back to the two brothers. "Thought you'd appreciate a speedy closure, sir."

"I don't have time for your games, Black; what do you _really_ want?"

"In light of yesterday's events at Hogwarts, the school's governing bodies have requested an investigation into the matter, if only to assure everyone that it was indeed an accident," Regulus took over, knowing that it would be better if it came from the Board and the Council than Dumbledore; from what he knew, Scrimgeour hadn't really appreciated Dumbledore's heavy-handed dealings during the War, and had little patience for the old man's schemes, even when they were as innocent as this. "The Headmaster has graciously agreed."

"I thought it'd be good practice for a newbie," Sirius jumped in. "Maybe even a trainee; Moody's been singing praises about _his_ , but you know that no one can say anything on the topic, not if they don't want to be on Accidental Magic duty until eternity," he added, a little pointedly; he'd been denied a trainee for the past three years on account of his caseload (never mind that actually having an assistant wouldn't be a bad thing) and that he'd somehow taken up more than half of Alastor Moody's responsibilities, namely handling his Auror team. All that without even a pay rise. To say that he was impatient for the old Mad-Eye to retire was an understatement, if only he could finally get the coveted position of a Senior Auror. "She's only been under him for a half-year, not even that long."

"He does sound more enthusiastic about her than he has in a while," Scrimgeour allowed. "Fine," he agreed, pulling out a form and filling it out quickly and neatly before handing it to Sirius. "I think it's time he proved his boasting isn't unfounded, and a little good old-fashioned gruntwork among _children_ should be just the thing he needs. You'll be sure to see that delivered to him."

"Certainly, sir," Sirius said, offering a conspiratorial grin, before marching his brother out of the office.

As soon as they'd safely cleared the earshot range, Regulus turned to him with a frown.

"Who's Moody's trainee and why did you want him on this?"

"It's Dora, and I figured, if you and old Dumbles need something fudged, it's best if it's someone from the Order that can be trusted."

"Dora? Andy's Dora?"

"Yup. I've no clue how she got so lucky; Mad-Eye's a craggy bugger, but three years under him and she'll be shooting for the top. James and I had _wished_ to work with him when we were trainees. He's still the best Auror in this place, even with his creepy eye and his wooden leg."

"Nicely done, big brother."

"See," Sirius told him with self-satisfaction, "it's not only you Snakes that occasionally know the art of manipulation. Sometimes we less privileged get one or two good ones in, too. Now, come on; I wanna deliver this in person, see the expression on his face when he sees where he's been put, and then we need to get to Albus; I need to let him know the latest, and I imagine you have certain things to clear up with him, as well."

"Oh, of that, Sirius, you shouldn't have _any_ doubt."

* * *

 **A/N:** Bear with me, please; I know Harry's, Ron's, Dean's and Seamus' actions paint them in a very negative light in this chapter, but I do intend to address this in due course. Bullying should _never_ be taken lightly or dismissed as 'boys will be boys' or some such excuse, and given how easily it was written off as 'youthful indiscretions' when it was James', Sirius', Remus' and Peter's similar actions in canon, I wanted to give the topic its due consideration, which necessitates me showing it for the bad thing that it is (and contrary to what this chapter may be implying, my intent really _isn't_ to incite hatred for my main character, that would certainly be counterproductive to what I'm trying to do here). It may take a while, but I promise Harry and his friends will grow and learn and become better, hopefully in a believable way.


	14. Ch 13: The First Quidditch Match

**Chapter 13: The First Quidditch Match**

Word of two Aurors coming to Hogwarts to sniff about the troll incident spread through the school like Fiendfyre, and the fact that one of them was the famous Mad-Eye Moody only exacerbated the frenzy.

It died down a little after the children figured out that there was an actual reason for said nickname, and, furthermore, that the last name was quite well suited to the man.

Albus found this endlessly entertaining. While Alastor's posting was not originally his idea, and he'd thought it rather counterproductive with regards to determining if Quirinus really _was_ their culprit, he had to admit that there were benefits.

Namely, the fact that Alastor had been amenable to treating this as what it had been sold to him as – a training opportunity for young Nymphadora Tonks. It had taken some tightrope walking, telling Alastor what was going on without giving him any information that might alert the DMLE what was currently stored in the school and why, but after years of fighting together, it wasn't too much of a hardship to find the right words.

Alastor was not happy, to say the least, both because Albus was doing things he didn't agree with and because he hated being stuck with hundreds of brats for days on end, but he'd agreed that it would do more damage to stop things now that they'd been put into motion than let them continue on and be there at the end in case things went wrong (and Alastor was absolutely convinced that they _would_ go wrong, his paranoia giving him no respite).

So, they'd made the Aurors' visit out to be a big spectacle rather than anything else, with him stomping through the hallways and glaring at children or hiding in Albus' office, and young Miss Tonks conducting her own 'investigation', with him giving her pointers here and there. The conclusion she came to was surprisingly suitable to Albus, in any case, which was exactly what he'd hoped for.

"From what evidence I have found, the troll belonged to a group that had passed through the region several days prior to the date in question," Nymphadora reported. "He separated from the group and entered the Forbidden Forest, where he stayed for several days before being driven out; my assumption would be that he had encroached on Acromantula territory, and they chased him out. It seems it was just bad luck that he'd ended up so near Hogwarts during one of the most magic-fuelled days of the year. That close to the school, even the magical protections couldn't have held the smell in."

"So, your conclusion is that it was an accident," Albus summarised for the girl, who looked at Alastor for confirmation before nodding herself.

"Yes, Headmaster."

"Your recommendation, Trainee Tonks?" Alastor demanded.

"My recommendation would be to re-evaluate Hogwarts' magical defences and update them accordingly. Other than that, I don't see how this could have been prevented."

"It will be taken under advisement," Albus promised. "Thank you for your time."

Having finished the official portion of the meeting, Nymphadora seemed to relax a little.

"Sir, would you mind if I met with some of my former housemates?" she asked. "I've not had a chance to speak with them since finishing my N.E.W.T.s earlier this year."

"Of course, Miss Tonks, you are welcome to join them; I believe they are about to have lunch."

"Thanks!" she said, turning to rush out of the room and nearly tripping on one of Albus' visitor chairs. Alastor rolled his good eye at her grin as she straightened and disappeared out of the office; Albus didn't even try to suppress his fond smile.

"You like her," he teased his friend, who harrumphed in answer.

"She's one of the more competent ones this go-around," he admitted, almost grudgingly.

"That is high praise indeed, coming from you. Also, Sirius told me you've been bragging about her," he added with a twinkle in his eye.

"She'll be better than that little punk just as soon as I train the clumsiness out of her."

For some to the young man unfathomable reason, Moody had never warmed up to Sirius Black, even after ten years of working together. Albus was pretty certain it was simply because Sirius was far too boastful for Moody's taste. Not as rash as he'd been during the War, but still the type to run headlong into danger, which ran contrary to all of Alastor's cautious tendencies.

Even so, it was good for the man to have a protégé he truly liked. He'd been getting far too isolated for Albus' liking lately, and Nymphadora was a breath of fresh air, eighteen and eager and definitely more than proficient enough. Alastor needed someone to get him out of his head a little, someone to temper the raging paranoia that hadn't abated even after ten years.

"How much did you leave out of her report?" he asked.

"Surprisingly little. It's impossible to tell whether the troll was convinced to wander this close to the school by the Acromantulas or a wizard, with the way you disposed of him."

It took some effort to control his wince. The troll had been dead by the time everything had been sorted out enough for him to even consider finding a way of communicating with it. Poppy had done a preliminary post-mortem on it and determined that the fire Harry had started had been strong enough to prevent the troll from properly breathing, thereby suffocating it. "Yes, an unfortunate oversight."

"Or a masterful assassination."

Well, that was a thought to consider. "By Remus' accounts, Harry has a rather developed magical core for his age, though his control is not as refined. It was oversight to assume... but there is nothing for it now."

"Considering everything else that's suspicious about this, I'd not even call it a farfetched suspicion," Alastor pointed out.

"I'll look into it."

"I'll make sure any other inquiry from Hogwarts comes to me or Black, but ensure there is none. Scrimgeour's not an idiot."

"You have my word on that."

"Good," he agreed, leaning on his staff to get properly on his feet. "Ugh, thank you for sending my trainee off to frolic with the little buggers," he growled testily. "Now I have to wade through them to get her. And I'd just trained her not to be so excited about a new case. You've probably undone months of my hard work, Albus."

"I'm sure you'll have her back in line in no time."

"Yeah, yeah," the old war veteran muttered, waving his hand in dismissal as he stomped his way out of the office, leaving Albus with a little smile on his face as he popped a sherbet lemon in his mouth.

If this training assignment with Nymphadora went well, perhaps he'd even get Alastor to retire and maybe take up the DADA position for a year, he thought to himself. It would certainly benefit the school populace at large; they'd not had a competent instructor since poor Ethelbert Thrasybulus eight years ago.

And he really needed to find time to look into bypassing that frustrating jinx Tom had put on the position, since all his efforts at removing it had been such colossal failures, and it really seemed like there were slim pickings in the DADA instructor department these days. Why Hogwarts refused to work with him on it, since it was her magic that had been tampered with, he couldn't tell, but after years of research, he'd pretty much exhausted that avenue of inquiry completely.

Perhaps it was time to get more creative. After all, if the Council had found a way of working around Cuthbert's tenure, then there had to be a way of working around this as well, without potentially doing more damage than good.

He'd definitely be needing some help with that, though, he decided with a sigh. He so hated having to rely on Lily and Regulus so much. Well, nothing for it; Tom was bound to find a way of coming back to full power, and he needed Harry trained enough by then to be a true foe to the monster, or everything would be lost.

And that reminded him; he needed to let Severus know when the best time to set up his defences of the Stone's location would be; the younger man's brewing was finally complete. Perhaps the coming Saturday, when the school would be nigh-on empty? Yes, that would do nicely. And, he might actually get his pseudo son to watch a game with him, too. That had always been one of those things he'd longed to do with his own child; if only he'd chosen one that actually _liked_ the sport, he might have gotten to do it years ago. As it was, devising creative excuses to get the man to do it with him almost made up for the disappointment of Severus consistently avoiding it. After all, an innocent little game of cat and mouse was far more interesting than anything he'd played in years, and he suspected his boy knew that very well.

Well, Albus _did_ love him for his mind, as well as his heart and character, after all.

* * *

The morning of the first Quidditch match of the season dawned extremely crisp and bright. Harry, more than a little excited, scuffed down almost five fried sausages and toast, already mentally going through the plays Oliver had been drilling them on for what seemed like every single day. It was a good thing he was naturally good at picking up school stuff, because there was no way he would have managed to keep on top of his classes with the amount of practice they'd been having lately.

" _How_ can you eat?" Dean asked him, a little incredulous. "I'd be far too nervous for it."

In response, Harry shrugged. "Need my strength up, yeah?"

"He's right," Seamus pointed out. "Seekers are always the ones who get nobbled by the other team."

"Ta for that, Seamus," Harry retorted with a roll of his eyes. "Did you get that banner made in the end?"

"Yeah; we had to get the bushy-haired bookworm's help with the changing colours, though."

"Why? Didn't my ink work nicely enough?"

"Harry, if I'd used your ink, you'd not have any left," Dean pointed out. "Besides, Hermione seemed happy to do it when I explained why I needed it."

"Any sign of Snape retaliating?" Seamus asked. "Seems he's not taken our warning to heart; he's still hanging about the bushy-haired bookworm. Bushyworm?"

"Merlin, can we not talk about that tosser right now?" Ron snapped. "I'd rather my day not be spoiled until _after_ the match."

"Don't worry," Harry told him, patting him on the shoulder. "I'll get the Snitch quick as I can; then we'll have one over on _all_ of Slytherins. And... Bushyworm?"

Seamus shrugged. "Well, it's shorter than what we usually call her."

"I'm not sure she'd like it," Dean piped up.

"Oh, who cares," his best friend said dismissively. " _I_ _'_ _m_ not the one who saved her life; I can call her whatever I want."

Oliver's loud whistle made Harry almost jump from his seat. Merlin, he'd been conditioned. Groaning internally, he stuffed the remaining part of his sausage in his mouth and waved to his friends, before hurrying after the rest of the players to get ready.

He had a match to win in an hour.

* * *

"No," Evan said, very resolutely.

"Yes," Tracey replied, stubbornly staring him down with her hands crossed over her chest.

"Oh, for– why? Why are you insisting on this?"

" _Because_ , it's our House playing against _Gryffindors_ , and I am not going to be there alone to watch them destroy those idiots."

"And somehow _I_ _'_ _m_ the only person you can think to go with?"

"What are you two arguing about?" Hermione asked, having bee-lined for them just as soon as she'd entered the Great Hall and noticed the standoff.

"Davis is finding it necessary to go watch the Quidditch match, and apparently I'm the only person suitable enough to go with her."

"I thought you hated Quidditch," Hermione pointed out, with mild confusion.

"Exactly! See, Davis? I'd just be ruining it."

"You," Tracey said, turning to Hermione, "are coming with us."

"What? Why?"

"Because it's an experience that every Muggle-born needs, and if you're going, then Snape will _have_ to go, as he won't have anyone to spend the day with."

"I'm sure Stheno will be delighted to have me to play with for the morning," Evan said, sounding quite satisfied with that plan.

"Your _Kneazle_?"

"You know, I _could_ go," Hermione said, doing some quick calculations in her head. "I do want to see how that banner turned out, and I'm sure Harry would appreciate me cheering for him."

Two Slytherin heads swivelled to stare at her in abject horror, and it was all she could do to give them a confused look and not burst into laughter.

"That's it," Evan declared, getting up to nearly drag her with him. "I'm gonna have to go with you just to make sure you're not under the Imperius and are forced to do something foolish like _actually_ cheer for the Prat."

Looking gleeful, Tracey hurried after them.

"And _I_ _'_ _ll_ be there to spell your voice away if you even _try_ ," she told Hermione, who allowed the other two to push her out towards the castle entrance.

Mission accomplished.

And they told _her_ she was not sneaky enough to get one over on them. Really, the hubris of Snakes was right up there with the hubris of Lions. Though Hermione did note to herself that she had no room to complain, not when it had served her well enough to make certain Evan wouldn't be spending the day alone with his homesick thoughts.

Also, that banner she'd worked on with Harry's group did turn out nice enough that she decided the hassle of finding spots on the edges of Slytherin and Ravenclaw stands where the three of them could be together without too much ribbing was worth it. Now, if only she could get herself psyched up for the game, too, perhaps the day wouldn't be as wasted as she feared it would be.

* * *

" _And the Quaffle is taken immediately by Angelina Johnson of Gryffindor_ _–_ _what an excellent Chaser that girl is, and rather attractive, too_ _–_ "

" _Jordan!_ "

" _Sorry, Professor. And she_ _'_ _s really belting along up there, a neat pass to Alicia Spinnet, a good find of Oliver Wood_ _'_ _s, last year only a reserve_ _–_ "

Oh, hell.

It figured that Albus would arrange to meet with Severus about finalising the protections for the Stone on the same day the first Hogwarts Quidditch match of the year was held.

Standing on the grass, staring at the colourful pitch from which the sound of hundreds of children was already giving him a headache, Severus considered just going home and coming tomorrow. He was sure he'd find Albus more easily then anyway.

Except that he knew perfectly well this was deliberate; Albus had been trying to get him to enjoy this frivolous activity since Severus was in his sixth year. It was, he assumed, an amusing game for the old man, trying to get the surly Potions Master to enjoy the food-for-the-masses entertainment, and every new failure only seemed to spur the man on.

And yet...

Evan was probably there. Severus had tried, valiantly, to get him as far away from Quidditch as possible, and for the most part, his son had absolutely no interest in sports. But Evan was also a first-year, and this was his first Hogwarts Quidditch game. Moreover, it was Slytherin that was playing, against Gryffindor, and Evan had not been quiet in his complaints about Potter getting onto the team, the first first-year to do so in thirty-eight years and the youngest player in more than a century. He'd be there, if for nothing else, then to boo the Gryffindors as loudly as he could.

Evan was mature for his years, but he was still only eleven years old, and not even Severus had managed to avoid _every_ Quidditch game in his seven years of schooling.

So, fortifying himself against the noise and the mass of bodies he was about to wade through, Severus trudged up to the pitch and searched out the entrance to the faculty and guest stands. The game was well underway, and looking at the board, he could see that Slytherin was in the lead. Good.

He climbed the stands about half-way and, considering whether to cast a self-deafening spell to block the voice of the exuberant child who was playing the official commentator (" _Slytherin in possession_ _–_ _Chaser Pucey ducks two Bludgers, two Weasleys and Chaser Bell_ _–_ "), tried to spot Albus' ridiculous figure. He didn't know what the man had chosen to wear today, but he had no doubt it was as garish and eye-soring as usual. Albus was nothing if not predicable in that area.

Unfortunately, he couldn't see half of the stands, because there was a huge sign obscuring half of his vision. It was red and gold (obviously; no Slytherin had so little self-respect as to bring and hold up this horror), and was held by two people sitting on opposite sides of this particular section.

So of course it had to be Sirius Black.

Remus Lupin was sitting next to him, and from the flash of orange hair that Severus could see, it was one of the Weasleys who was holding the other end of the sign, probably Arthur. Severus didn't think Molly was quite that big a fan, even if two of her sons were playing.

Growling under his breath, Severus pushed through the seated row until he'd reached the insufferable wizard, who had found just that moment to jump up and loudly holler. One of the Slytherin players had, apparently, blocked Potter, making his broom spin so wildly out of control that the boy nearly fell off. Severus found himself thanking whatever deity there was that his son had absolutely no interest in this death-trap of a game.

"Foul!" Black screamed out. "He could have killed my godson!"

"You could try being a little louder, cur," he noted darkly, "I'm not sure the people in America had heard you."

" _So_ _–_ _after that obvious and disgusting bit of cheating_ _–_ "

"Snivellus!" Black exclaimed, scowl morphing into a grin almost from ear to ear; it made him look more like a dog than Severus was comfortable with. "Come to see my godson kick the shit out of your former house?"

" _Jordan!_ "

"Unlike some, _I_ have far more important work than watching some pointless, senseless game," Severus sneered. "Now put down that sign so that I can locate Albus."

Black snorted.

" _I mean, after that open and revolting foul_ _–_ "

"Right, sure, _that_ _'_ _s_ why you're here, because you're looking for Dumbledore. And you couldn't have climbed up to the top and tried looking for him from there."

" _Jordan, I_ _'_ _m warning you_ _–_ "

"Sirius," Lupin chided, but Black ignored him completely. As did Severus, of course.

" _All right, all right. Flint nearly kills the Gryffindor Seeker, which could happen to anyone, I_ _'_ _m sure, so penalty to Gryffindor_ _–_ "

"Your sign would still be so ugly it'd be making me go _blind_ ," Severus retorted as his frustration mounted. "And I can't very well look for Albus without my _eyes_."

" _–_ _Who puts it away, no trouble, and we continue play, Gryffindor still in possession_ _–_ _Now Slytherin in possession_ _–_ "

"Oh, you poor thing, how would you _ever_ survive without your eyes?"

"Certainly better than you've been surviving _with_ them. Is your face still smarting from that wall you _walked right into_?"

" _–_ _Hit hard in the face by a Bludger, hope it breaks his nose_ _–_ _only joking, Professor_ _–_ _Slytherin score_ _–_ _oh, no..._ _–_ "

Black's eyes narrowed as he glared at Severus. "For your information, it was a glass wall. Muggles have glass walls."

"Oh, and here I thought it was just invisible."

"Well, I'd like to see you t–"

"Harry!" Remus gasped, his eyes glued to the sky, an expression of deep panic settling on his face. The two arguing wizards turned to look, and the sight that greeted them was a deeply uncomfortable one – Potter's broom was shaking wildly, trying to buck the child off, and the boy was holding on with all his might. It seemed that no one else had yet noticed it, because the other players were still very focused on their game.

"Someone's cursing his broom," Lupin said.

"That's Dark Magic," Black growled, now more than ever appearing as a dog, enough that Severus had a momentary urge to shuffle away from him. "Someone is _attacking_ my godson."

Severus took a moment to study the erratic movement of the broom, before sweeping the stands for a possible culprit, which, to his frustration, _he couldn_ _'_ _t see_ because of that damned sign.

"Black, Lupin," he said forcefully, "find the person who's doing this; they need to be maintaining eye-contact with the broom for this curse to work."

"And you?"

"I'll keep him in the air until you find and stop the real caster. I know exactly what this is," he answered darkly, not even waiting to see the two shuffle out before he'd pulled his wand out of his pocket, pointed it discretely at the wobbling child, and begun casting.

* * *

Twenty minutes into the game, things went to hell. The first indication that something wrong was happening was Hermione's gasp. Evan turned to look at her, only to notice that her eyes were glued to something high up in the sky – that something being Harry Potter's broom giving its valiant best to throw its rider off and probably badly injure him once he actually hit the ground. Evan felt chills rise up his spine.

"What's wrong with his broom?" Hermione asked, eyes wide as they trailed Potter's struggling form up in the sky.

It couldn't have been from that block a few minutes before, because Evan had spoken enough with the proprietor of the Quidditch shop in Diagon Alley about the spells used in the production of brooms to know just how resistant that magic was to outside influences. So, either it had been defective from the start – not bloody likely, what with it being bought by an Auror – or...

"It's Dark Magic, Mi," he said urgently, casting a look around him at the other Slytherins. Most of them didn't seem to have noticed anything wrong yet. "Nothing else could interfere with a broomstick, especially not one used officially in Quidditch matches, they are warded against those kinds of things."

Ignoring Tracey's protests, Hermione tugged her binoculars out of her hands and started looking at the crowd frantically.

"Could a student do it?" Hermione asked from the other side, while Tracey shot her a glare designed to kill. Evan squinted up, thinking on the question as he studied the wildly shaking broom. Potter was barely holding on to it now.

"Not this powerful," he replied with a shake of his head. "Dark Magic requires intent, and this much intent means someone wants to kill him, someone who's comfortable with the idea of murder."

Hermione's head swerved to her right, towards the part of the stands allocated for professors and guests. She gasped and handed him the binoculars, eyes still glued to the stands.

"Evan, look! There's someone there, see, muttering and staring at Harry! The man in the black robes, there, see!"

Looking through them, Evan scanned the crowd, and found that he had to blink a few times and swallow through his suddenly too-dry throat when he realised that the black-clad figure was _his father_. Merlin, he'd missed his dad desperately, but this wasn't the time to fall apart, because as much as he hated Potter, he didn't want the boy dead, and so he had to focus on the current situation and deal with his own stupid emotions later. Just as Hermione had said, Severus was staring unblinkingly up at Potter's thrashing form and muttering non-stop under his breath. His brain momentarily stopped at the unpleasant thought, before discarding it with complete incredulity; his father would _never_ harm, let alone try to kill, a child. And what the heck was he even _doing_ here?

"Could he be jinxing the broom?" she asked anxiously.

"No," he replied immediately, trying to search the stands around him for another suspect and dismissing the question of his dad's presence for the moment. It was just getting in the way, bringing up his homesickness; he would deal with it later. "No, I'm hundred percent positive he's not doing it."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because that's my dad, and if he's doing anything, it's a counter-jinx," he replied. "There's got to be someone else."

"Your dad? But I didn't see anyone else," she muttered nervously.

"I know, I don't see anyone else either," he shot back. It didn't matter all that much, considering half of the people were seated so that he couldn't see their faces, hidden as they were behind those in the rows before them or by that ridiculous red sign someone had been holding up from the very start of the game, the huge one with a roaring lion, Potter flying around and words _Gryffindor for Game-changing_ emblazoned in golden letters.

"What should we do? We're too far away, and we don't even know who's doing it."

"Why would you want to do anything?" Tracey asked from his other side, somewhat disdainfully. "Serve him right if he fell off his broom. Potter the Prince, so extraordinary he gets to be the only first-year allowed to play for the House team."

"Do you want his death on your conscience?" Hermione replied shrilly. "He'll be killed if he falls from that height, and you would choose to do nothing when you could save him?"

"He won't, there are protective enchantments on the pitch to cushion falls, and besides, he's a _Gryffindor_. Why should I care what happens to him?"

"Because you claim to be a decent human being?" Evan snapped at her, barely catching the shame flicking over her face before she'd hidden it; ignoring her, he turned to Hermione. "We need to make whoever's doing it break eye-contact."

He saw the moment the bushy-haired girl's brain came up with the idea, because her eyes went comically wide. She tugged his robe sleeve sharply, pulling him down the row, and he only had enough time to hand the binoculars back to Tracey before he fell over his own immobile feet.

Typically, Tracey hurried after them; she was as nosey as the worst of Slytherins, and this was far too juicy for her to pass up on.

"Where are we going, Mi?" he asked with exasperation at the both of them, untangling his arm from her grasp and shooting glares at the people who laughed at his predicament.

"We need to be closer," she replied in an excited whisper. "Don't you see? We need to blind whoever's doing it."

"So, basically the whole section," he reiterated.

"Exactly. Now, come on!"

In three barely-worded half-sentences, they agreed on a course of action. Slipping under the stands, Evan ran to the other side of the one they'd decided to be the most likely place of the culprit. When he got into position, he could easily distinguish his friend across from him by her wild hair. Her wand was already raised, and she was only waiting for him do to the same. Then, nodding to each other, they said the intended incantation, one that they'd learned just last week.

" _Verdimillious!_ "

(Naturally, Tracey just stood there with an unimpressed look on her face and observed, the bint.)

Large bursts of green light shot out of their wands, colliding in mid-air above the guest stands and exploding in a blinding flash of greenish light. Evan and Hermione, having expected this, had their eyes closed, but they heard multiple startled yelps, screams and pained gasps all around as people tried to shield their eyes.

Squinting through his eyelids, Evan studied the guest stands, which had received the full brunt of the explosion, just as the two had intended. To his amusement, some of the people had actually fallen off their seats – Flitwick was nowhere to be seen, and Quirrell had landed squarely into the lap of the person behind him, who was in that moment in the process of pushing him off, while a formerly dignified-looking adult who had to be a parent of one of the Slytherin players had shot his arms out in shock, hitting the two people beside him squarely in the chests and knocking them down. His own father was shielding his eyes with a pained expression on his face.

Evan had to wait several seconds until the light fully dissipated to look up at Potter. He smiled smugly when he found that his and Hermione's little stunt had indeed worked brilliantly – Potter was back on his broom, and was now diving madly for the Snitch.

Biting his lip in thought, Evan disregarded the insane dive-bomb the boy was making in favour of moving into the stands and reaching his father. By the time he looked back at the field, Potter was jumping off of his broom on the grass and gagging into his hand. The next moment, something that shone brilliantly in the sun was in his hand, and with downing horror Evan realised the boy had _nearly swallowed the Snitch_!

Damn, if Tracey thought it useful to inform the rest of the Snakes how he was the reason Potter had managed to regain control of his broom and win the match, he was doomed.

Reaching the black-clad man, Evan took a moment to regain his breath – he was _really_ out of shape physically – before greeting his father with a loud 'what are you doing here?' over the roar of whistling, clapping and other kinds of cheering still thundering through the pitch. He barely held in his sudden need to hug his father tightly, knowing the man probably wouldn't appreciate it before they cleared this up. Homesickness reared its ugly head up again, but he pushed it down insistently; just a little bit longer, he told himself, the same thing he'd been telling himself every single morning. Just six more weeks, and he could go home.

"Evan," his father responded, looking down at him with a scrutinising expression, right eyebrow lifted slightly. "Why aren't you with your House?"

"Oh, I... erm..."

"That flash of green light was you, wasn't it?" his father accused, now openly glaring at him. Evan felt himself drawing in. Most of the time, his father was just a menacing, towering presence, but every once in a while, when his displeasure reached a certain point, he became downright terrifying. Not that Evan had ever been afraid of his old man, but there really was no way of not being affected by it if you weren't Lily Snape.

"Yeeeaaah," he stretched it out, unsure whether it was the right answer. When his father's black eyes narrowed, he hastened to correct himself. "I mean, yes, it was Hermione and I."

"And I assume my attempt at preventing serious harm to that brat didn't escape your notice?"

"Well, no, but–"

"But what?" Severus asked impatiently.

"It wasn't working!" Evan burst out, finding himself feeling more than a little defensive. It was _his_ action that had saved Potter, after all, his and Hermione's, and he didn't appreciate his father not even acknowledging it. "I knew you were doing a counter-jinx, but he'd have fallen if Hermione and I hadn't done something!"

"And since when is it your job to save Potter's blasted spawn?"

"He's still just a kid, Dad," Evan pointed out harshly. "As big a prat as he is, I don't want him dead! And Hermione would have never let me live it down if I had just not done anything." And who was he to condemn that, anyway? He'd been casting a counter-jinx the whole time. "Besides, why were you trying to save him? I mean, you hate Potters, both of them. And Potter's guardian, too."

"Someone mentioned me?" Sirius Black asked, fighting his way through to them. He was breathing heavily, and there was a grim look on his face that made him look, for the first time Evan had ever seen, a little unhinged and plenty dangerous.

"Did you find them?" Severus demanded to know.

"No, the damn light blinded me, and then some idiot couldn't keep his balance and knocked me down. I don't know about Remus, I haven't seen him since Harry caught the Snitch."

"Find him, and meet me at the school; Albus needs to know about this."

"You think he didn't see it?"

"He wasn't here," Evan piped in before either of the adults could say something else. "We haven't seen him today at all, and if he had been here, he would have tried to help Potter, wouldn't he?"

"Albus would not let a single student get hurt if it was in his power to stop it, and this definitely was," his father confirmed.

"Right," Sirius Black said. "I'll see you as soon as I find Remus and check on Harry."

Evan cocked his head lightly, wondering, as he watched Potter's guardian vanish in the throng of people, at the congeniality and cooperation between the two men whom he knew to have been warring for twenty years. Then he shrugged and followed his father to the nearest exit; enemies or not, those two had fought in the war together, so he guessed he could see how that had forced some efficiency on them in these sorts of situations.

Though he tried to imagine himself and Potter working together like this, and promptly discarded the very thought with disgust. There was no _way_ he'd _ever_ work with Potter on _anything_ , even if it did involve saving an eleven-year-old kid.

"Keep away from that boy, do you understand me?" Evan's father said once they'd fought their way to the lawns beyond the pitch.

Evan half-rolled his eyes, stopping the moment he caught his father's expression.

"It's not like he and I are best friends, Dad. It's _Potterprat_ , for Merlin's sake. I'd rather drink Skelegro than spend any of my time with him and his vapid friends."

"See that you do," Severus warned, starting his walk up to the castle in brisk, efficient steps. Evan nearly had to run to catch up with him, his annoyance rising in proportion with the number of steps he had to take for every one of his father's. Couldn't the man slow down a little, at least? He knew Evan couldn't keep up with him like this for long.

"What are you doing here, Dad?"

"I had business with the Headmaster. When I didn't find him in his office, I assumed he would be observing the match. Clearly it was not the case, otherwise the culprit of this little fiasco wouldn't have dared do it."

Something uncomfortable dropped in Evan's stomach. "I don't know where he is."

"I didn't ask you if you knew where he is."

This time, he _did_ roll his eyes; very theatrically too, just to make sure his father saw it. It would just irritate the man even more, and Evan knew from long experience that an irritated Severus Snape was an unpleasant Severus Snape; when he was annoyed, he only ever gave curt and scathing answers, and it would take him ages to get over it, anyway. Well, Evan didn't care; he was irritated with the man, too, and if his father could go around venting on everyone and sunder, then so could Evan vent on him, especially when he was the one annoying him in the first place.

"So, is this business the same one you had this summer? Does it have anything to do with what happened on Hallowe'en?"

Severus gave him a hard look over his crooked nose.

"Evan Stephen, what were you told about the incident on Hallowe'en?"

"To let it go," he answered, not even trying to keep the sullenness out of his voice; that letter his father had sent him in response to last week's events had only served to make him angry with his father, who hadn't even had the decency to be polite about the way he'd told Evan off for even daring to question something that hadn't made sense.

"And why have you disobeyed me?"

"I didn't! I just... it's the only thing that fits, see! There's something on the third floor and someone tried to create panic at the school during the Hallowe'en Feast and you've been doing something top secret for Professor Dumbledore since July! And it has to be connected!" The half-answered puzzle was burning holes through his head, and the only person he knew who had ever helped with that was his father, so excuse him for thinking that perhaps he could actually get somewhere with actually _asking_ him.

"Evan..." his father growled, eyes flashing. Evan narrowed his eyes in his own impotent fury.

"Oh, come on! I've not done anything, Dad, I just want to know if I'm right! Please, can't you tell me that?!"

"I will not tell you a single thing if you don't put that temper under control _right now_."

Gritting his teeth, Evan inhaled and exhaled forcefully through his nose a few times, less to calm himself, because he wasn't in the mood to calm himself, than to keep some of the nasty things from coming out.

"I'm eleven, Dad, I'm not five. I'm not an idiot, and I have the right not to be told _something_!"

"You have no right to any such thing. You are a _student_ of this institution and the Headmaster's _private_ business is none of yours."

"Not when he's putting us in danger!" Evan yelled out. "Hermione almost died! She's my friend, Dad!"

"And your insolence and insubordination will not get you anything but a thorough spanking."

Evan's mouth popped open.

"Spanking?! I haven't been spanked since I was eight!"

"And you will be if you continue with this deplorable, childish behaviour."

Well, screw _him_. Evan crossed his arms over his chest and glared; his father could go right back home as far as he was concerned, because if he was going to be making an idiot of Evan, then Evan would have nothing to do with him. "Fine, don't tell me. See if I care."

His father's eyebrow rose in response derisively. "Reverse psychology is a very poor attempt at being slytherin, and it does not work against anyone but gullible people. It will certainly not work on _me_."

"Whatever," he answered, turning towards the school.

"Evan Stephen Snape, what did you just say to me?" his father's words cut the air, deadly and promising nothing good.

It was one of those things he just _couldn_ _'_ _t_ say to his father, because it was a dismissal, and Evan did not dismiss his own father, not ever. The last spanking he'd gotten was over this exact point, after he'd mucked about with potions that were even now far too complicated for him, let alone when he was eight. His father had lectured him, and provoked, Evan had said 'whatever'. He could barely sit on his bum for the rest of that day. Needless to say, he'd never uttered it afterwards, until right now.

And he felt like he should have been terrified, because his father's face looked almost murderous. What he felt instead was fury to match the man's, and he had no idea where it had come from, but right at that moment, he welcomed it.

"You heard me," he shot back instead. "Go have your sodding talk with Dumbledore, I don't bloody care! If you don't ever want to tell _me_ anything, that's just fine. Not like you _ever_ trust me enough with anything."

It was possibly the worst thing he could have said, and it served quite effectively to push the man over the edge. Enraged, Evan's father took a step towards him, and Evan raised his head challengingly high, even as his bruised heart fluttered in his chest in belated fright. He knew this had earned him a spanking, but right at that moment, he couldn't be arsed to care, no matter that his body was telling him he should run.

He was on the verge of tears, anyway; this would at least be a good enough excuse.

"Hey, Evan!"

The moment Hermione's voice rang out through the air, everything froze; his father stopped in his steps, expression morphing into his usual imposing mask, though his eyes promised that this wasn't over and done with. Evan couldn't quite decide if he wished for it to be over immediately, or if he wanted it postponed to a point where half the school wouldn't see him being dragged off to be punished. On the one hand, the expectation always made everything worse; on the other, he wasn't keen on giving Potterprat and his band of bullying toadies even more ammunition.

"That was brilliant, wasn't it?" Hermione said, running up to the two Snapes with a grin. Evan only managed a weak imitation of one that probably looked more like a grimace than anything else.

"Sure."

"Oh, I checked on Harry, he seems completely fine."

And Merlin bless her, but the fact she'd still not noticed the tense atmosphere between the two of them was distracting him, if only a little bit, enough that he could snort at her words and shake his head. "Of course he'd be fine, Mi, he's _Saint Potter the Invincible_."

Not interested in retorting, Hermione turned to his father and gave the man a smile.

"Hello, sir. I'm Hermione Granger, Evan's friend. You must be his dad. I read a lot about you in _Potion-Making through the Centuries_ and _Brilliant Magical Inventions of the Nineteen-Hundreds_ and–"

"Yes, I know who you are," Severus cut her off, scrutinising her appearance the way he'd scrutinise an interesting potion ingredient. It had the desired effect – Hermione shrank into herself lightly, smile slipping off her face.

"Hey, Mi, maybe you should ease up on the fangirlism," Evan whispered to her, shooting his father a warning glare for scaring his friend.

"Sorry, sir," she said sheepishly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Didn't mean to be disrespectful."

"She just can't help herself," Evan added, studying his father's expression to see if he was still angry. Surprisingly, the dark man seemed almost reminiscent. "What?"

"Some things don't change with time. I assume they are still serving lunch at this hour."

The comment was clearly made in order to get them moving back, and Evan fought hard to ignore the rolling of his stomach at the implications.

"What did you mean by that, sir?"

Severus looked down at her through his hair, smirking lightly. "Muggle-borns are usually the ones who find historical books with insignificant details the most interesting."

"Was Mrs Snape like that?"

"Oh, yes, Lily was enamoured with any and all books on magic I showed her before we started Hogwarts."

"Evan said she can fly?" Hermione asked, clearly still impressed with that information.

"Yes, it was the focus of her Charms Mastery," Severus confirmed. "A skill that was perfected by very few individuals over the past five centuries. It requires either tremendous amounts of magical talent, or a latent affinity for Charmwork. Lily possesses the second in spades."

Evan would have laughed out loud at Hermione's almost star-struck gaze in any other situation. She seemed to be absorbing information like a sponge, and if he didn't love his best friend quite this much, he would have been thoroughly frustrated with her already. Ever since figuring out who his mother actually was – as, quite surprisingly, for all that his parents been married for ten years, people still somehow missed the fact that Lily Evans and Lily Snape were the same person – Hermione had been quite obsessed with her and everything she'd done in the past decade and half, and had thus been driving him quietly up the wall. But, for once Hermione's fangirling felt soothing and comforting and _safe_ , and he found blind fury rising at the memory of Potterprat and his gang demanding that he stop being friends with her. Fuck them; Hermione was _his_ best friend, the one friend he'd made on his own and not because his parents had introduced them, the first person who got him, who seemed to know what he needed even when he himself didn't quite understand, and he would destroy them before he let them take her from him.

Them, or his father, or anyone else who tried. Hermione was his friend, _his_.

Dumbledore was standing on the steps when they reached the entrance, hands clasped behind his back, observing them with bright blue eyes behind his half-moon spectacles. Behind him stood the two men his father had agreed to meet, Potter's godfather and Evan's mum's good friend.

"Severus," he greeted once they were close enough.

"Albus," Evan's father responded. "I assume you've been informed of the incident at the match?"

"Yes. I have also been informed that Mr Potter's timely rescue came in the form of an ill-timed Slytherin cheer."

The way the old Headmaster was looking at Hermione and Evan told them that the man already knew what had really transpired.

"You should best hurry, Mr Snape, Miss Granger, before all the food disappears. There are quite a few students whose hunger was motivated by today's eventful game."

Knowing they were dismissed, Hermione hurried to leave the adults to their business; Evan himself tarried, unsure quite how he felt, a mix of anxious, angry, frustrated and pained, and for a moment he wanted to complain and demand that they be included, since they'd saved Potter in the first place, but then his father gave him a sharp look, and he found the words stuck in his throat.

"Our discussion isn't over," the man told him ominously. "I will find you after lunch."

When he entered the Great Hall, the noise and the smell made his stomach almost jump into his chest, and Evan knew he'd not be able to eat a single thing, no matter how draining that magic and his turbulent emotions were.

To Evan's shock, Tracey was already dragging Hermione with her to the Slytherin table. Evan, momentarily pulled out of his own head, walked after them in bemusement, so that Tracey could have him glare at Crabbe and Goyle until the two boys freed enough room that the three of them could talk in peace. Evan wasn't much into the discussion, per se, but he did force himself to pay attention, if for nothing else, then for the strangeness of Tracey's behaviour – she'd not only gone from sneering at them for trying to save Potter to pulling them to sit with her and gossip about it later on, she appeared to actually _want_ to spend time with Hermione in public after everything, which was simply mind-boggling. Studying together was one thing; being seen socialising with the Ravenclaw know-it-all was completely another.

"What were you two thinking?" she hissed at them as soon as she was certain none of their year were close enough to overhear. "That was..."

"Successful?" Hermione offered.

"Awesome?" was Evan's guess.

"All right," Tracey grumbled, "it _was_ a little smashing. But still completely reckless."

"It worked, that's what's important," Hermione told her. "So, why aren't you telling on us to everyone right now?"

Good; she was finally picking up on Slytherin thought process, if only a little.

"She's saving it for the most useful occasion, of course," Evan told his bushy-haired friend. "What's the point of ammunition if you just use it immediately?"

"Yes; unlike _some_ ," and here Tracey threw a loathsome glance in Parkinson's direction, "I know how to not be a disgrace to my House."

"Sure, sure, but that still doesn't explain why you won't be using it," Hermione pressed, surprising Tracey enough that the mousey girl blinked and stared in silence at her.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"Of course you do; you wouldn't have dragged me to sit with the Snakes unless you actually liked me enough not to mind being associated with me, and _now_ if you use it, someone's bound to remember us talking and think that you were in on it from the start."

Tracey opened her mouth, then closed it, then huffed, and finally grinned through her chagrin, as if she couldn't help herself.

"Fine. I might have... not said the best thing at the pitch there."

"Well, you don't say," Evan snapped, earning himself a curious look and a glare for his trouble. Disgruntled, he settled himself a little more comfortably on the stupid bench and kept his silence while the two girls discussed the Norville Flosslax books, of which Hermione had had time to read three, what with her load being the biggest of all first-years. In spite of everything, Evan couldn't stop the talk from drawing him in, so that by the time his father came to collect him, he'd almost forgotten about his own emotions, even if his stomach had remained upset enough that he hadn't eaten with the girls.

He wasn't sure whether that was better or worse as Severus led him to Dumbledore's office in complete silence, because when it all came back, he found himself a lot less angry and a lot more upset than he'd been before.

* * *

Watching her best friend silently follow his father out of the Great Hall, Hermione tugged on the skin of her lip in anxiety.

"You think he'll be fine?"

"Nothing more we can do for him," Tracey murmured, sounding almost as worried as Hermione was, though she managed to conceal it far better. "It's something he'll have to clear up with his da on his own."

"I know. I just wish... anyway, thanks, for this. And I'm sorry for taking your binoculars like that during the match."

"'S fine. I'm... er... good thinking."

"On this, or on figuring out the thing with the sitting arrangements and the information?" she asked the girl with a little grin, feeling quite pleased with herself either way. Tracey's smile was a grudging one, but honest nonetheless.

"Both. You're not so bad after all, Granger."

"You aren't either, Tracey."

Even if Hermione still couldn't figure out what her grudge with Gryffindor was.

* * *

By the time the first hoo-ha of winning the match died down, Harry had been hugged by pretty much every single girl on the team (which _was_ rather nice, if he did say so himself) and either clapped on the back or had his hair ruffled by every boy. It felt very nice to be the centre of attention, especially for something that he'd been told he'd gotten from his father; he knew Sirius would be proud of him for this, and even Remus would have to crack a smile. Unlike his scar's fame, this time it was his skill, his own, that had earned him that attention, and he didn't have to feel guilty for disrespecting his parents' sacrifice.

In spite of that, he found himself grateful when the team started vacating the changing room; the girls, of course, had gone to their own after expressing their happiness with Harry, and most of the boys ended up following Oliver out in search of food; Harry's stomach was still a little upset for food just yet after that horrendous shaking he'd suffered, and with the adrenalin high fading, he found that he wanted to just take a moment to sit and breathe properly from all the excitement.

"You all right, Harry?" Fred (or George... probably George, he seemed like the more caring twin) asked him, and Harry realised with mild startlement that the three of them were the only ones left.

"Yeah, sure."

"We were ready to catch you," the other twin (so, most likely Fred) told him, looking more solemn than Harry was used to from Ron's brothers. "If they'd managed to knock you off the broom."

"You think it was on purpose?" he asked, finally taking a moment to properly think through it.

"Yeah, mate," the first twin confirmed. He placed his hand on Harry's shoulder, and the gesture ground the first-year more firmly in the here and now; he appreciated it silently. "I bet the Slytherins were right pissed that their cheering had saved your arse–"

"Especially when you won us the match."

"D'you think it was them?"

"Not rightly," possibly Fred scoffed dismissively. "Unless there are some Death Eater wannabes in the seventh-years, but we've not heard much."

"And we _would_ have heard," most likely George assured him. "In any case, we've got your back," he promised, turning towards the door when the footsteps that had been echoing for the last few seconds drew close enough towards the door for them to see whom they belonged to.

Sirius and Remus stopped when they saw that Harry wasn't alone, but the twins were quick to vacate the room after placing another soft pat on his back (George?) and ruffling his hair a bit (...Fred; definitely Fred). They gave Sirius a smile, and took a second to be properly congratulated for their flying by Remus, before disappearing into the corridor beyond, closing the door behind them.

The moment they had privacy, Sirius was striding across the room and pulling Harry into a bear hug. Harry grimaced at the rough handling as his face got squished into Sirius' robes, and he tried to squirm out of the embrace, for a second appalled at what any of his teammates would say.

"I'm– Sirius, really, I'm– I'm completely fine."

"Shut up, Harry," Sirius growled, sounding almost like when he did as Padfoot. "I'm your godfather and I'm allowed to hug you if I want."

"Only because Dad didn't have anyone better to leave me with."

"That's right, which means you're stuck with me, so shut your mouth and suffer it for a few seconds more."

His pride satisfied and exhaustion catching up with him, Harry suddenly found his mind turning to the fact that someone had tried to kill him, that he'd almost fallen off his broom to his possible death, and his strength left him. He sagged into the safety of his da's embrace, shaking with residual emotions that he didn't have to hold in any longer, and fought for breath. After a moment, Sirius dropped onto the bench and jostled Harry into his lap, so that Harry could more easily bury his head in the juncture between Sirius' chin and collarbone, where his familiar scent was strongest, and simply breathe and enjoy the sensation of Sirius' hand carding through his hair soothingly, the other one resting on the side of Harry's face, shielding him from the world and from thoughts of falling through the air without anything to catch him. He didn't even notice that his fists were clutching the man's robes tightly, but it was not like it mattered; Sirius would never push him away, anyway.

Rough fingers on his ankle pulled him out of his head a bit, and he turned his head to blink at his honorary uncle from the safety of his guardian's embrace. Remus looked a little haggard, which was a little surprising since the full moon was so far away, so Harry took a moment or two to think about why that was, just in time for Sirius' hold to weaken and for him to figure out that it was because he'd been at the game, too, and so he must have seen Harry trying to hold on for dear life.

He clambered off Sirius' lap and into Remus', where he was again enveloped in a hug, one that was more wiry muscle than bulk but just as strong, if not stronger than the previous one. Harry delighted in it, too.

"You scared us to death, Prongslet," Remus told him softly.

And now, after the fact, he found that he felt a little frightened, too; he tried to think about how he'd felt at the time, and could only remember the heightened sense of... well, everything, whilst he'd fought to hold on to the broom. He'd been just a smidge scared then, too, maybe, but he'd felt pumped, just like when he'd faced the troll, and besides, it had served him well enough to catch the Snitch.

"But I won my first official Quidditch game," Harry said, beaming slightly from where his face was still buried in Remus' clothes, because that was by far the most important thing. Sirius chuckled and tugged on his sneakers.

"You certainly did; I think your old man would have had a heart attack if he'd seen you almost swallow that Snitch."

"Right?! That was wicked... though it did taste disgusting," he added after a moment of remembrance. Who would have thought that the ball could be that horrid, what with its flapping wings and cold metal.

"I bet it did," Remus said, somewhat indulgently, and allowed Harry to climb down to his feet so that he could properly face his two adults. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah. I mean, it was scary – but not too scary, just a little – but I'm fine now."

He didn't think either his dad or his two guardians would care much for how much or how little he was frightened, but then he didn't like to appear like a baby in front of them, so he had to clarify. He almost tugged them to their feet to get them moving – he wanted them to meet his new friends, and now was the perfect opportunity, plus he wanted to see if Ron was impressed with his little stunt – but remembered in the last second that Remus didn't like that, and so he refrained.

Right on time, Harry's stomach growled, apparently having gotten over its previous queasiness.

"So, plenty of excitement so far," the sandy-haired man said as both he and Sirius rose to follow Harry out of the changing room.

"Uh-huh. Did you hear how I knocked down the troll?"

"Sirius mentioned it in passing, yes."

"In passing?" Harry repeated, giving Sirius the stink-eye, before giving Remus a detailed description of that adventure that he managed to finish right around the time they hit the Great Hall and were accosted by Harry's friends.

When he sat down and piled his plate full with food (and then had to suffer Remus dumping some ugly-looking vegetables – really, who _ever_ liked broccoli of all things? – on top of everything else, too – but then that wasn't very new, since Remus had been doing it for as long as Harry could remember, even getting Sirius to do it when he couldn't come over, and wasn't that just completely unfair), with his friends and his favourite adults all sitting around him and talking about pranks and school days, the last of the worries left him completely, and he eagerly basked in the enjoyment of the best place to be on Earth.

* * *

Evan's dad led the way to the Headmaster's office after collecting him, giving Evan his first true look at the place. He would have loved to be allowed to explore, as it seemed the rooms were as whacky as their primary occupant, but his mind was far too distracted with the tense silence between him and his father for it.

Instead, he remained standing a little ways away from the Headmaster's desk, while his dad took a seat in one of the ugly-looking chairs. Dumbledore wasn't here, of course, though Evan hadn't expected anything better. He didn't think his dad would be able to administer that promised spanking in front of the old man.

"Evan. Come here."

And even if he had deserved that spanking, Evan found himself thinking as he did what his father demanded, he was still far too furious at being treated like some insignificant little brat for every single thing he did. His father had no reason to do that, no reason to suddenly think of him as just a bloody annoyance, when he'd figured out how to save Potter even when his father hadn't, and when he'd read the Headmaster's intentions when no one else in the school had. He'd _proven_ that he was good enough to know, and if his father would treat him like something not worth the man's time, then he felt he had every right to be angry. Even if it led to a spanking.

He stopped in front of his father and crossed his arms over his chest, determined to be obstinate to the last. For once in his life, he didn't feel like being the perfect child, the obedient son, and, he decided as he stared at his father's closed face, he wouldn't be. He refused to _ever_ feel as helpless as he'd felt against Potter and his gang, and he would be damned if he let his father bully him like those stupid idiots did.

"Are you going to spank me now?"

His father's face contorted weirdly for a moment, before smoothing back into that mask it was seconds before.

"Tell me what's wrong."

He scoffed at the thought that the man wanted to know any such thing; no doubt it was just a prelude to the lecture on why he'd deserved to be punished in the first place. Well, he'd give the man something to deserve the punishment, all right, and then at least he wouldn't have to suffer through the lecture, too.

He stayed stubbornly silent.

"Evan, tell me."

"Like you care."

"Evan." His father pinned him with those black eyes, and Evan hated how they moved this way and that as the man stared at him, the jerky little movements that meant he was trying to stare him down but was too close to properly focus both of Evan's eyes, and was switching.

That look never meant anything good.

And damn his stupid ingrained response to that look, because it made him cave.

"I am not a worthless brat!" burst out of him. "I'm not stupid! I know something's going on, something dangerous, and you won't tell me even though my best friend – my _best friend_ , the one I made myself, _mine_ – almost got killed! She didn't do anything wrong, she didn't deserve to be attacked by a troll, and you won't even tell me why, because you think I'm just an insignificant kid who doesn't deserve to know, and it's what you always do, always, you never tell me anything because I'm not good enough to know, and I'm sick of it! Sick!"

"Is that why you interfered with my counter-jinx today?"

"I saved him!" he snarled at the man. "Me and Hermione, we saved him, not you! All you did was scold me and tell me to keep away from him, like I'm gonna go being friends with someone I hate, someone who almost got my best friend killed! Potter would be _hurt or worse_ if it wasn't for me. Not you. Me. All you did was yell at me, like I'd been the one trying to throw him off myself! Mum would have been proud of me, she would have wanted me to save Potter, but you don't and you hate that I even tried!"

"Is that what you think?"

"That _is_ what you think, that is what you _always_ think, and that's the only thing that's ever important to you, that you get to hate them without having your son saving his life or your wife being nice to his guardian. That's always the most important thing to you, _always_ , not whether I got dragged to the Quidditch game against my will or how fast I figured out how to fix the problem! Because you don't care about anything but your own grudges from _school_ , from twenty years ago, against someone who's been _dead_ for ten years!"

And blast him, his eyes were blurry and stinging and the tears were salty where they slid into his mouth, but he was shaking from the fury and he was not going to give his father the satisfaction of anything more than what he couldn't control, he _wasn_ _'_ _t_.

"You didn't even say 'hello' to me, you just yelled at me, like you do every time you think I'm doing something that will embarrass you, and it doesn't matter that everyone else would think I did a good thing, it doesn't matter that I saved his life, or that I saw what no one else did, or that I'm best at potions, or that I made a friend all on my own, that never matters if there's something that you want to be angry about, and I _don_ _'_ _t need you_ when you'll only yell at me and hit me and ins–"

He didn't see it, damn him and his tears, he didn't see it when his father pulled him by his arms, strong fingers squeezing uncomfortably, and so he struggled to get away because in the end he didn't want to be spanked, he didn't want his father to be angry with him, but he was because Evan had told him that he didn't need him, and he did but he didn't want to, and his father's robes smelled of smoke and potion ingredients and home and he couldn't get away even though he tried because his father wouldn't let him, because his arms were like steel vices keeping him safe and his nose was so stuffy he had to breathe through the mouth and his eyes stung wildly but it didn't matter because he'd clenched them closed to be closer to his father's warmth, and he _couldn_ _'_ _t think_.

"I love you," the rumble in his father's chest told him in that deep voice, and Evan couldn't stop himself from sobbing and desperately clutching the black robes, because he wanted to go home, he didn't want to be here anymore, he wanted his room and his mum and his dad and he couldn't have it. "I am so proud of you."

He sobbed and sobbed and the sobs sounded too loud even though he let them out into his father's robes, but he did it anyway, and his father held him more tightly than he'd ever held him, and all Evan wanted was to stay here forever and for his father to never let him go.

"I want... to go home."

"I know."

"I wanted y... you to be happy t... to see me, and you _yelled_ at me... Why did you y... yell at me? I thought you'd be... happy."

"I'm sorry."

"I _miss_ you... _Please_."

And his father didn't let him go, just picked him up like when he was little and held him while Evan cried and cried and cried and cried, and even then his dad didn't let go, until the knot in his chest loosened and his eyes were too tired and hurting to keep them open, and his father was too warm and he was finally _safe_ , and when he couldn't cry any more, he was too tired to move even a little bit, and he couldn't remember why it was not good to fall asleep, why it hadn't been safe, and he was too tired to think.

He fell asleep without even knowing where his father had carried him off to.


	15. Ch 14: The Trials of Parenthood

**Chapter 14: The Trials of Parenthood**

When Remus emerged from the fireplace at Sundance Street, the almost deafening quiet was an unexpected shock to his system after the rowdiness of the school, and he took a moment to allow his ears to adjust to the pleasant lack of the cacophony.

Sirius, who'd gone before him, was already on the other side of the sitting room, pouring himself a rather full glass of scotch. Sighing softly, Remus approached him and placed his hand on his best friend's shoulder, rubbing his back as the black-haired man took a long swallow of the alcohol. When he placed the glass down and reached for the bottle, however, Remus gently laid his other hand over the glass to stop him going down that route.

Remus knew that Regulus indulged Sirius in this, and most of the time, he let the two brothers to it, knowing that the younger would always have enough wits about him to take care of the older one. But, given Sirius' history right after the War, he himself refused to do the same. Even if Sirius had never been willing to admit it, he drank far too much, and Remus knew perfectly well how slippery that slope was. He wasn't willing to sees Sirius go down it again.

"He almost died right in front of my eyes, and I could do _nothing_ to save him," Sirius said softly, hand tightening on the neck of the bottle. In response, Remus gently pried his fingers away and allowed him to drain the scotch that he'd already poured into the glass, putting the bottle back in the cabinet and locking it with a wave of his hand.

"Harry is fine. He would have been fine even if he'd fallen, you know that. There are safeguards on the pitch, and we'd have caught him with our spells if it had come to that."

"That's not the point," his friend growled, before turning away from Remus and hurtling the glass across the room. It smashed with an unpleasantly loud noise that contrasted sharply to the dull thumps as the biggest shards fell onto the carpeted floor. Remus gave Sirius a moment to just breathe through his impotent rage – Merlin knew Remus had been feeling the same thing ever since he'd first realised something was wrong – before tugging his friend sharply into an embrace. Though unwillingly, Sirius came to him, curling into Remus' body with barely hidden desperation.

"Alastor will find who did it, and they will be punished," Remus promised, carding his fingers through Sirius' silky locks. "And Albus will make certain that no one attempts it again."

They'd talked about it after Harry had gone off with his friends; Severus hadn't joined them for some reason, though Remus had expected it due to the very active role the man had taken in thwarting the attempt. Moody had been called in the meantime, as there was no way anyone would have let Sirius investigate the attempt under any circumstance. There hadn't been much in the way of a plan, but Remus knew that it was far more likely that things were being kept from the two of them on purpose. He hadn't complained, mostly because Sirius had done enough complaining for the both of them, but also because he knew where his efforts in this needed to be – handling Sirius and ensuring Harry's emotional wellbeing.

"I was _useless_ to him."

"You were there for him," Remus countered, dragging Sirius to the couch where he could properly relax against Remus' side and maybe even unwind a little. "That's what you were supposed to do."

Tickling Remus' cheek with his hair by shaking his head, Sirius grumbled in obvious dissatisfaction.

"I was supposed to help him. Instead, it was _Snivellus_ and that little spawn of his–"

"Careful, Padfoot; that's Lily's child you're talking about."

"He's still Snivellus' spawn."

Remus smirked to himself lightly at Sirius' childishness, but let it go. Sirius would never allow himself to see Severus as anything other than a school enemy, but at least when it counted, he knew to trust and the man and could work with him towards a common goal; Remus had learned that skill the summer between their fifth and sixth year, in no small part due to his fellow Marauders' actions (and Lily, of course, she was the glue that kept them all together in spite of everything), but Sirius had been forced to acquire it in that horrible war that had scarred them all far too much.

"We all play to our strengths, Padfoot, you know that. Severus was the one best equipped to deal with Dark Magic, and I'm certain he would have kept Harry in the air even if Evan hadn't interfered, just like I know you would have caught the person who'd done it if you'd had more time to work with. Albus will make certain that no outsiders have a chance of doing this again, and Harry will be safe at Hogwarts."

"He's such a resilient kid, isn't he, Moony?"

"Yeah, he is."

"Just like James."

Frowning, Remus looked down at his friend. "You think he was pretending to be all right, don't you?"

"I don't know," Sirius admitted with a deep sigh. "Sometimes, I fear that I made him think he should be like Prongs. I tried not to, you know I did."

"Yeah, Siri, I know," Remus confirmed, running his fingers idly through Sirius' hair. "But you idolise the memory of James, and he was bound to pick it up from you. We never tell him about the bad things; maybe that's a mistake."

"I wanted him to be proud of James."

"As he should be. But he'll realise soon that not even his parents were perfect, and we need to manage that. I think he went after the troll on purpose."

Sirius pulled back a little and looked up at Remus with a frown. "What? Why?"

"Because I can't imagine a Ravenclaw Muggle-born being reckless enough to go after a troll on her own, especially not if she is as well-read as the boys claim."

"You mean, bookworm know-it-all. No, wait, didn't Seamus call her 'Bushyworm'?"

" _That_ is all your fault," Remus shot back with some irritation. "First it was the Junior Marauders, now this. Next thing you know, they'll be trying to turn themselves into animals just to give themselves nicknames. That's not a laughing matter," he scolded the moment he noticed Sirius' wide grin. "The fact that you lot pulled it off at fifteen doesn't mean it's safe in the least, or that it should be done. And you know what I think about you never reporting it, either."

"Yeah, that I'd lose my job."

"You'd go to Azkaban, Padfoot. That's a little more serious than losing your job. And don't even dare say anything about the pun, you hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah. I've lived for fifteen years without anyone finding out. I don't turn outside the house except for the full moon, and you and Harry are the only ones who know."

"You're forgetting Lily and Severus," Remus pointed out, earning himself a dismissive wave of Sirius hand.

"We both know they'd have said something long ago if they had any intention of revealing it to anyone."

That was true; they'd both promised the Marauders' arguably biggest secret was safe with them back when they'd all joined up with the Order with righteous fire in their hearts, determination in their eyes, and suspicion for any form of authority in their minds – including, in Lily's case, that of Albus Dumbledore himself. Remus had no illusions about who had influenced whom on this point, especially since he'd probably known of Severus' true connection to Dumbledore before even James, let alone Sirius or Peter.

And speaking of...

"Wormtail, too," Remus added quietly, hating how Sirius' whole body stiffened at the name.

"Don't," Sirius said sharply. Remus hated the fact that they'd never caught the traitor, but Sirius was still almost incandescent with rage. By all accounts, Peter had scampered off to the continent, and from there to America, where they couldn't have followed after him even if they'd had the manpower for it. It was one thing Sirius had never forgiven Remus for, that he'd kept Sirius back in those crucial hours after James' and Mary's murder and forced him to think of Harry first, instead of James. If he could have, Remus would have gone after Peter himself, but his own obligations towards the Werewolf Unionist Faction and Sirius' need for a stable support system had prevented him just long enough for Peter's trail to go dead cold. After ten years, there was nothing either of them could do about the situation, and Sirius would never make peace with it.

It took the man some time to relax again after that, and Remus regretted bringing up Peter so soon after Harry's friends had brought back memories of the man with their innocent questions about the Senior Marauders' days. Remus had been able to steer the discussion away from any overt triggers, but perhaps he'd not fully internalised his own stirred emotions. Still, after a few minutes, Sirius laid his head back on Remus' shoulder and allowed Remus' touch again.

Sometimes, his best friend reminded him horribly of his Animagus form; Sirius as Padfoot adored being petted, and that bled through into his human form, as well.

"He called me 'da' again," Sirius whispered, and Remus felt his heart clench. Merlin, but the man had made it all so horribly complicated for the child, all for that stupid blind loyalty he still held towards James. Remus had long ago given up trying to sway Sirius on the subject; he'd managed to get him to treat Harry as his own in most instances, but the question of address had always remained off limits, and Remus knew full well how much power names carried. "I feel like I'm stealing him from James every time it happens."

"Sirius, James is dead," he said, perhaps a little more bluntly than he should have. Sirius flinched, and Remus' hold on him changed from gentle to firm. Perhaps teaching Harry about his father as a person, rather than as an ideal, was not the only overdue course of action, and Merlin knew Sirius would never be able to do it himself. Remus loved Sirius, he did, but there were moments when his best friend made him feel startlingly strong hatred, too. "You can say that he's James' as many times as you like, but the fact is that that child only ever had one true parent, and that's been you. The more you insist on this fantasy of James, the more you'll hurt both him and you."

"It's not a fantasy."

"And Harry's not the only one who occasionally uses the wrong term of address."

In the deafening silence that followed, Remus found himself thoroughly unwilling to have this conversation, not least because Sirius was far too maudlin currently to properly hear him. Still, it was something that he decided needed to be done.

Perhaps just not right this moment.

"Come on. You need to sleep, and I could use a nap, as well. Let's go up."

"I am not _that_ old, Moony, that I need naps in the middle of the day," the man grumbled, through his voice contained obvious relief that Remus had, at least for now, backed off this line of discussion.

"Sirius, it's Saturday afternoon, and if I leave you alone, you'll either get drunk or go to work, and you've been working too much as is. You're going to rest, and afterwards, we'll go see a film or something."

"A film. Really, what are we, sixteen-year-old virgins on a first date?" Sirius groused, climbing to his feet and pulling Remus up. In reply, Remus just rolled his eyes.

"Because you think I'd want to go clubbing with you, after the last time? There's a film I want to watch, _The Fisher King_ , it's gotten good reviews, and you may as well come with."

"Moony, our thirties are supposed to be the best years of our lives. We should be out getting laid, not watching Muggle melodramas."

"For your information, it is a comedy-drama, and don't you get laid enough as is? What happened to, what was her name? Julia? Junia?"

"Juliana, and that's not been on for almost two months. Two months, Moony!"

"Well, if you ever gave an actual relationship a try, perhaps you'd not be suffering dry spells."

"Because you know so much about 'actual relationships'," Sirius shot back from the top of the stairs. "Merlin knows the only relationship you've ever suffered through for this long is with me."

"Because you'd be completely lost without me," Remus pointed out as he stepped into Sirius' bedroom. "Besides, I don't suffer an aversion to relationships, unlike some people in this room. I just happen to not be in one currently. Or have you forgotten the pesky problem of me being a Dark creature?"

"If you had a little more confidence, that wouldn't be a problem, Remus," Sirius pointed out as he sprawled on his usual side of the bed, face-down.

"Oh, don't even talk to me about that," Remus shot back. "You're the one who sabotaged my relationship with Estelle because you couldn't stand me spending that time of the month without you."

"I did you a favour, Remus. That woman was _evil_."

"Just because she was a little too vocal on the political front–"

"She threatened me bodily harm if I 'monopolised any more of your time'. During-the-full-moon bodily harm. She didn't even try to veil it in nonspecific phrasing. Not that it would have mattered much in any case, but I'd rather she didn't know about me, and if she's dumb enough to threaten an Auror that way, she's a bad Knut, and you were better off as far away from her as I could get you."

Sighing, because this was another argument he'd never win (and also because he did sort of agree with Sirius; he'd been young and stupid, and Estelle had been surprisingly open-minded about their shared affliction – perhaps too open-minded, as Sirius always pointed out in these moments), Remus shrugged out of his robes and laid down next to Sirius with his fingers locked on his stomach.

"You suppose there's someone who'd not mind..."

"Your furry passenger? You know, Dora always asks after you when Harry and I get invited to Dromeda's for supper."

"Dora is also barely eighteen years old, Siri. I'm not a cradle robber."

"Oh, pull the other one; she's old enough to chase criminals, she's old enough to pick her men, and believe me, I've listened to enough of Dromeda's grumblings to know that Dora likes her men more mature than the average eighteen-year-olds."

"That doesn't mean I want to tempt the wrath of your cousin, even if I were to be interested in Nymphadora Tonks."

"So, you aren't?"

"That's it; you are officially forbidden from matchmaking me for the rest of our lives."

Sirius' laughter was the fully-bellied one, and Remus couldn't hold in his own grin, because it was good to hear it after everything that had happened today. Even if it had cost him the humiliation of 'the dating talk'.

* * *

Being the owner of a mostly by-order shop had very early on proven to be an excellent idea, mainly for the fact that Lily loved having the occasional weekend off, and Saturdays tended to be the most frequented days of the week in Diagon Alley. Working primarily by order rather than off the counter meant that she could, like today, close up shop early and, like today, have an afternoon lunch out without feeling either the guilt or the strain on the household budget.

She shook out her napkin and draped it across her lap before gently picking up the glass of white wine she'd ordered and taking a sip, feeling quite content for the moment. The restaurant she was in was one mostly visited by the London businessmen and businesswomen, Muggle and far enough from most popular wizarding spots that she would not be accidentally recognised.

This suited both her and her lunch companion quite nicely.

She placed the glass back on the table just as she felt a light brush of cloth against her shoulder, and turned to smile at her friend, who gave her an answering smile even as she seated herself across from Lily.

"Hullo, Dorcas," she greeted the woman. "Or, should I say, Minister?"

"Oh, please don't," the woman replied with a weary sigh. "I am thoroughly sick of the position already; I honestly do not know how I've let you and the rest convince me of running for it."

Lily snorted lightly at that. "We both know you just did it for a chance to meet the Queen."

Dorcas held her insulted expression for only a moment, before cracking into laughter, and Lily joined her heartily. Though she'd not met Dorcas until she'd officially joined the Order at eighteen, Lily had quickly become friends with the other witch. Eight years older than Lily, Dorcas was a tall, severe-looking woman whose shoulders were always straight and whose gaze was always challenging. She wore her dark brown hair in a low bun these days, though she'd had it usually falling about her face when Lily had first met her, and in her build she reminded the younger witch of a gazelle – someone who was lithe on their feet, who could run, react promptly to any situation they were in. And really, this was quite an appropriate description of Minster for Magic Dorcas Meadowes, and one that suited her current situation quite nicely. She wasn't someone who pushed for progress, certainly, but she was quick to react to such suggestions, and wise enough to surround herself with people who knew what sort of progress was necessary.

The waiter came around just as they'd gotten themselves together, handing them both a menu, and Dorcas ordered herself a glass of white wine, as well, before settling down to peruse the food offer for the day. Lily did so as well, deciding very quickly on an octopus risotto, since she had a craving for a good seafood dish. Dorcas, a vegetarian, ordered a simple ratatouille when the waitress came back for their order, and Lily waited long enough for the woman to walk away from them before casting a very weak _Muffliato_. It was definitely one of her favourites when it came to Severus' spells.

"It is good to see you, Lils," Dorcas said, now that they could finally turn to business. "You would not believe how swamped I am with paperwork. One would think that there are secretaries for that, but no, the minister herself has to read though and check every little thing. I suppose, in this case, it's turned out for the good," she added darkly. "I've caught at least two dozen inappropriately worded or even completely different proposals that, apparently, people had expected me to sign." She shook her head. "It took some rooting out, and I'm quite positive that it's Lucius Malfoy behind it, but he's buffered himself well enough that the poor sod who'd done it was the only one we could pin the blame to. Still, at least now they know that I will not run our government the way Bagnold had done in the last few years."

Lily almost sneered at the mention of the previous Minister for Magic. Millicent Bagnold, if she'd ever been a good minister, had been good only right after Voldemort's downfall, when she'd not had the least grasp of the political situation and could thus have been influenced into signing off on all their Muggle-born progressive suggestions. She'd been appointed as a wartime minister, and Voldemort's sudden demise six months in had caught her absolutely off guard. Her asinine comment about the extremely serious breach of the International Wizarding Statute of Secrecy (that wizards had had an 'inalienable right to party') had quite effectively incurred her the wrath of the International Confederation of Wizards, and her popularity domestically plunged into an all-time low within months. This had been caused in part because the Order campaigned to have James and Mary Potter considered the saviours of Wizarding Britain, rather than their six-month-old baby, on whom Bagnold had been choosing to focus, and in part because even if Voldemort had been vanquished, his cohorts hadn't, something that had become blatantly obvious to the general public with the vicious attack on Alice and Frank Longbottom, then considered two of the brightest new stars of the Auror Corps, and both from beloved, high-standing Pure-blood families. Bagnold had chosen to rely on Bartemius Crouch to bring her reputation back up, which had ultimately backfired spectacularly when'd been was revealed that one of the people responsible for driving the Longbottoms into madness was Crouch's own son. To say that Bagnold had become both vulnerable and desperate within a year of the war's end would have been an understatement.

The Order had used that quite effectively to their end, especially because so many of the Pure-blood faction were too busy trying to avoid imprisonment to put up any sort of political fight. Therefore, Bagnold had been quite easily convinced to implement the then-popular public policies that resulted in the gradual shift of power to the pro-Muggle-born faction. Puppet minister, Bagnold hadn't been, but as Lily found most Ravenclaws to be, she'd been easy enough to steer towards a point of view that had suited them. It had worked for quite a while, too, until the Pure-blood faction had come back into their old power; for the last three to four years, Bagnold had shown that she was not adept at both handling the unstoppable tide of change and standing against the opposition to that tide. Getting her out of that office had been a priority for the Order, and if not for Regulus Black, she would have been retired a year and longer now.

Lily knew why Regulus had gone so blatantly against them – Voldemort wasn't gone, and though the younger Black brother supported Lily's endeavours in educational reform, he couldn't be seen to be agreeing with the pro-Muggle-born faction. Aside from that, with the sprouting of the various political parties, the election procedure had to be completely revamped, which had required Bagnold to stay in office for a little longer than she'd wanted; Regulus' actions in this matter had given the extreme rightists time enough to establish their candidates, but they'd also given the CMB time to ally themselves with the many small leftist parties, as well as the Equal Rights Coalition, and agree on a single candidate they could all back.

Dorcas had been that candidate; a moderate leftist, a Half-blood with a Pure-blood father and a Muggle-born mother, and a war veteran, she suited almost everyone. She'd spent two years recovering from serious war injury and building political contacts in the United States, which allowed her to join and quickly advance through the Ministry's Department for International Magical Cooperation to the position of deputy department head under Barty Crouch, whose job she'd ended up actually doing behind the coulisse – he'd seen it as a demotion from the Head of DMLE and had chosen incompetency as a passive-aggressive protest, so Dorcas had had to pick up the slack, which had had the fortunate result of expanding her understanding of the world's various wizarding systems. Aside from that, she was well versed in the collectives of the many creatures that were part of the ERC, as her mother had been the Head of the Department for Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures for five years, with another ten years as the Deputy Head beforehand.

Dorcas' win had not been a landslide by any stretch of the imagination, but it had been a clear majority vote, thanks in large part to Bagnold's last decree as the Minister for Magic, which exploited a loophole that had been a natural result of the heavy retooling that the voting system needed to go through. During the crazed post-war years, three populations of beings had managed to establish their own political parties before the puritanical wizards and witches in the ministry had had the time to stop them – werewolves, vampires and goblins, whose parties had formed the core of the Equal Rights Coalition. They battle for survival of these parties had been fierce, but ultimately victorious, which left open several thorny questions with respect to the evolution of the political system, one of them being the election of the Minister for Magic. The decree targeted this specifically through a simple clarification that all those who had legal right to a party representative – meaning, those with a political party capable of putting forth a ministerial candidate – also had the legal right to vote for their candidate if they so chose. Bagnold had to be convinced that as a decree it would be seen to serve the purpose of superficially pacifying the three groups on the matter of wizarding intolerance towards them, but that there really would not be any true repercussion from it given just how tight-knit and how isolated from the rest of the wizarding society they were. They would no doubt pick and vote for their own candidate, and their numbers were so low that these candidates would never get elected. Regulus had played some very subtle subterfuge in order to keep the Pure-blood faction from getting wind of the Order's efforts, and with only three days between the degree publication and the election, nothing could be done to stop it. These efforts had netted Dorcas the additional seven and a half percent of votes in total that tipped the balance firmly in her favour, but with them came the obligation of repayment if there was to be any progress in the following years.

And this was, ultimately, one of the most important things. If they could make sure that Dorcas remained the Minister for Magic as long as Bagnold had, which had been a good ten years, then perhaps, by the beginning of the next century, they might even be able to start the gradual integration of Muggle modernity into the wizarding world with the purpose of bring Wizarding Britain to the logical, modern position that the other progressive wizarding countries were now taking, a position that, instead of widening the divide between the fifty or so thousand witches and wizards and the fifty plus million people living in the United Kingdom today, would help them become actual full-fledged members of the British society, without violating the Statute of Secrecy.

"I wish we could have gotten more of that out in the open," Lily said with a sigh. "That Malfoy and Nott had gotten off scot-free, for all that everyone knew they were Death Eaters, it really eats at me sometimes."

"You know that we couldn't have done more," Dorcas pointed out with her usual practicality. "Not with Dumbledore already standing up for people who were known as being Voldemort supporters, Regulus Black, Kyla Yaxley and even Severus, to name a few, and not with Amelia Bones incapacitated as she'd been and bloody Crouch losing the vote of confidence after that debacle with his own son."

"If only there had been some less loyal Death Eater than Bellatrix and Crouch Junior with them when they'd attacked Frank and Alice, we could have put them all in Azkaban."

Dorcas sighed. "How are they? I've not gone to see them in some time."

"Pretty much the same," Lily answered. "Augusta says that most of their days are good, and that's certainly when I've almost always seen them; Alice likes to animate the dolls and Frank enjoys racing in those toy cars, and their magic is still far too erratic, no matter how much progress the mind healers make in at least healing those parts of their brains. Bad days, though..." she shook her head sadly. "I witnessed only one, but trust me, between having them be childlike and having them be actually lucid enough to know what had happened, I would rather that they are at a five-year-old's level. I honestly admire Neville; he's the only thing that can calm Alice down when she's in one of her fits. Frank, they have to nearly put him in a coma to get his mind away from the Cruciatus memories."

"Oh, Merlin..." Lily took a sip of her wine so that she wouldn't have to see the horror in Dorcas' eyes.

"Severus has been working on some potions that might encourage neuronal healing, but he just doesn't have enough background in neuroscience to be making much progress. Most of the things non-magical science community has discovered in the last two decades are not something known in magical circles. It's not just the socio-political situation that's lagging behind, Dorcas, it's everything. You know as well as I that magic cannot heal everything, especially if we don't know how to properly and safely target it, and to do that, we need an understanding that is far more fundamental than what we have. Non-magicals have that, but good luck trying to convince our healers at St. Mungo's or elsewhere to look into it."

"Well, maybe finally getting this integration going might help with that."

"Not until something is found to allow magic and electricity to coexist," Lily rebuffed. "For all that we've done in the scientific fields, and all that they've done, we still can't properly integrate it without parallel experimentation, and that won't happen until we can use non-magical methods for testing magical nature. Sev's been subscribing to some scientific journals for the past few years, and from what I've read in them, there is simply no way to replicate the effects of certain machinery, because they are becoming so delicate that it's simply impossible to control one's magic to the extent necessary to consistently achieve the same efficiency. That's the limitation to magic that Pure-bloods would never want to acknowledge, you know; it's only as good as we are, and in these cases, we simply cannot be good enough. I should know, I work with such magic most of my days."

"I do admire your time management," Dorcas said. "Run a business, push for political change, experiment with magic, raise a son, have an active social life."

"Well, Sev's the one who runs most of the business; I'm atrocious with money management. I just do my work and cover a shift at the store; he does everything else. And I've not gotten around to that until I left the CMB. Our wares sell well enough that we don't hurt financially even if other projects take up more of our time than is the norm, and the fact is, we can substitute for one another in the production. As for the Order meetings..." she shrugged, "what's a few hours of the week, right? We've agreed on most of this years ago. So long as everyone manages their part, we're golden."

"I honestly think you should have stayed in politics, Lily; you could have done much more than push educational reforms through."

"I did my part," she defended, before acknowledging her friend's gentle wish as one that most people often expressed to her, even almost seven years after she'd gotten out of active politics. "For what it's worth, if that year hadn't been so difficult, I might have stayed. But it came to a point where I could either save my work or my marriage, and... I honestly don't think I could have survived without Severus, not after everything we've been though. My mother once told me that you cannot have a career, a marriage and children. I believe she was trying to get me to be an ordinary housewife at the time, she never condoned of my political activism. Nevertheless, she was right, in a way. Losing Violet had been so difficult, but I'd been too deeply involved with the CMB to see just how much it had hurt Severus. For all that he appears unemotional, he feels so deeply, Dorcas, and losing her and nearly losing me, and then dealing with Evan's night terrors and his ailing mother on top of it... I did what I had to, and giving up my work was the price I had to pay for it."

"I understand," her friend answered with great compassion. "And I don't blame you; Merlin, none of us blame you, Lily. But maybe now that Evan's at school you could get a little more involved? Nothing to the former extent, of course, but just... look, I'll be frank with you. The situation in the Ministry is worse than we thought. Bagnold pretty much destroyed half of our progress in the last three years. I don't know if she's senile or if she was being masterfully manipulated, heck, maybe she was even willingly working with the Pure-bloods, it doesn't matter at this point, but she's appointed incompetent people in most departments, she's given precedence based on blood status rather than ability, she's sunken far too much money into projects that aren't worth even close to the costs... and the last few months I spent at DIMC, she and Crouch were pushing through certain things that were sure to create tension with the German ministry, and with the Zauberrat's influence on the continent rising now that Muggle Germany's unified, we need that like we need a bloody swarm of ticks. On top of this, we're going to be getting an influx of refugees because of the chaos of the Soviet Union and the war in Yugoslavia, and considering how much more entwined the Muggle and wizarding worlds of those countries are due to their political systems and history, I can't even begin to predict who our political neighbours will be when the dust settles. If we want to open ourselves up to Europe again, then we need to seem like good partner material, and given our bad reputation, that's going to be hard enough without having to contend with internal sabotage in my own ministry."

"So, in essence, what you want from me is public exposure," Lily surmised, disliking the idea thoroughly.

"Like it or not, Lily, you're almost as much a public figure as the Potters, if for different reasons. The Americans and the Aussies have been looking down on us for our Pure-blooded centralism for decades, and with good reason, if one takes into account that most of their first-generation wizards had been Muggle-borns. Heck, they were willing to let us stew in that hell we'd been in ten years ago precisely because of that. You've not seen what I have, Lily, when I was there. We've not had a single Muggle-born run, never mind win, since poor Nobby Leach was infected with who knows what back in '68. That's one Muggle-born Minister for Magic in our entire history, Lily. Things are changing, yes, but clearly they're still not to the point where we could have had anyone else but me run, and it's little consolation to anyone that I'm half-and-half. I've already been approached by the Squib Rights Group; they feel that they might get a chance at some traction now that I'm in office, and I'm inclined to give it to them, but it won't go over well with the Pure-blood lot on top of all the things the ERC is clamouring for. Thatcher's gone, sure, but Major's politics are going to get the Muggle UK in the dump sooner or later, I can just see it, so I honestly don't think we'll be getting much support in our integration endeavours from that side, at least not until there's a labour prime minister. I need a sizeable political backing if I'm to do anything we've agreed on, and with Bagnold's mishaps the last three years providing more power to the Pure-blood fraction than they'd had in the last ten years, I'm not sure I can get it, unless someone well-loved by the people gets behind it. You know Dumbledore's pretty much spent his credit after Voldemort's fall, and his political activities have been steadily declining since, no doubt due to whatever you'd done to turn him around so thoroughly. He can sway the Wizengamot, but not to the extent we need if we are to do half the things that need to be done, and, even if he were to get back to his political heyday levels, I'm not certain we would want his backing in such doses. He's part of the old world, one that's going to be left behind in a decade or two completely; selling a new image with an old face will only backfire. That's why we need you, Lily. You're universally loved by the Muggle-borns, by the Equal Rights Coalition, and at least half of the Half-blood populace, most of wizarding Britain has shopped in your store at one point or another, you are good friends with Harry Potter's guardian, your son is in the same year as the boy, even."

"You're also forgetting that I'm married to a man who was associated with Voldemort more than a few times, and still is behind our backs, that both Severus and Evan are Slytherins, which can't sit well with the old Muggle-born population, that I've not been in the public spotlight for nearly seven years, and that even in the very beginning, I was considered far too radical by that other half of Half-blood populace you mentioned," Lily retorted, voice tight.

"You are married to the wizard who earned his mastery at barely nineteen and who is almost revered in the scientific circles, a man who has proven his loyalty by marrying a Muggle-born. You've been exposed enough with your work in Diagon Alley, and don't tell me people don't stop by just to shake your hand and thank you for getting us out of the gutter we'd been in after Voldemort's fall. And as for radicalism, well, our economic situation's not been better in decades, certainly not since the start of the War, and that's because of the changes you and the CMB have made. Your popularity's still going strong, Lily, while the Ministry's is falling again."

"Thank you, so much, Dorcas, for calling me up to have lunch together, so that you could spring this on me with barely a 'how do you do'," Lily shot, her ire finally spilling out. She wanted to get up and walk away, but the food hadn't even come yet, and she _had_ been hoping for a good gossip session with an old friend.

She just bloody hated being blind-sided.

"Look, I'm sorry," Dorcas said, leaning forward as if she could grab hold of Lily and physically keep her seated. "I'm sorry for dropping this on you, and I'm sorry for not telling you why I wished to speak with you. I just hope that you can get over it and think this situation through. Just, think it through. If you decide not to involve yourself after this, then fine, I'll not nag you. But the reformation of the Wizarding Britain had been your idea from the start, Lily, more than anyone else's. I said it once, I'll say it again, I fully understand why you felt you had to withdraw, but that was seven years ago. Surely whatever had been the cause is no longer an issue, and I'm not asking you to come back to the CMB at all. I'm tossing around the idea of creating some sort of advisory body separate from the Wizengamot, because there is no way of tackling the untangling of that legislative and judicial mess before I'm established enough that it won't be automatically dismissed, but something new needs to be introduced into the Ministry as soon as possible. My idea was that, if I manage to create the advisory body, you be one of my councillors. It wouldn't be a whole-day work, I was thinking maybe one meeting in a fortnight, but it would send a strong message and get people rallying again. We had a good seven-year run, even lasted another four after you left the CMB, but the sheep are starting to scatter, and it's damn hard to be a good shepherd when my ranch hands and my shepherding dogs are incompetent or, worse, outright want to sabotage me. If I pull this off, then you leaving the CMB would turn out to be a very good thing, because you're distanced enough from them now, after seven years, that you would be largely looked as unbiased, even with your pro-Muggle leanings."

Lily clenched her teeth and made herself see this for what it was – a friend asking her to involve herself just a little bit more in an initiative that had been her own damn idea in the first place. After the stillbirth, after Sev's accusations that she'd worked herself into it by breaking her back in trying to change their world, she'd admitted to herself that she was giving too much of things that were important to her to a world that was mostly ungrateful. Oh, the political party system they'd built had a large backing, yes, but she was not blind to the fact that Muggle-borns truly were heavily discriminated against, and that most people just weren't willing to get off their lazy bums and fix it. If she'd died in the War, she knew for a certainty that the wizarding world today would have been the same one she'd lived in: backwards, isolationist, discriminatory, and short-sighted.

Perhaps she'd pulled back too much; it was hard to think so, when she remembered how damn hard she and Severus had had to work to get through their hard patch in '85. He'd gotten fed up with the wizarding world back in their seventh year, when he'd first started figuring out how to continue his work as a spy and yet not get into Voldemort's organisation fully. He'd supported her formation of the CMB because he'd agreed with her that it was the only way to create a better world for their children, but by '84 he'd felt like the politics had taken her away from him and Evan. Violet's birth was supposed to change all that, and in his eyes, her political work had been to blame for his losing a child and nearly losing his wife, too. She'd felt that he was being unfair to her, that he was judging her when she needed his support. The situation had spiralled from there.

It had taken her a long time to understand that he was at least partially right; she'd been working far too much in those days, because there was never enough time and always too much to do. But admitting it to him had been harder by far and it had led to the reveal of their deeper issues, their insecurities and trust issues and the war-caused PTSD most of all, things they'd thought would have fixed themselves when they'd first managed to build their relationship and marriage and family, things they'd ignored because not ignoring them would have meant an uncertain future, and after the war, neither of them had been willing to take that hard look and face the possible outcome.

Just thinking of that period gave her a sick feeling in her stomach. They'd gotten through it, somehow, by the skin of their teeth, but they'd gotten thought it, and right now, the very idea of coming back made her feel like she was stepping back into that time of her life. But Dorcas was right, too, and Lily knew it. It wasn't fair to let her friends push where she'd first insisted, not if she herself wasn't willing to lend a hand.

"I'll think about it," she answered, throat dry. "And... I'll speak with Severus on this. But that's all I can promise you, Dorc."

"That's all I'm asking."

* * *

The house was quiet when Lily Apparated home, but for the first time in months, the light in the attic was burning dully, and her gut twisted in apprehension at what that meant. She didn't take her coat off, didn't even think to take her shoes off, just climbed silently to the top floor of their little townhouse and stood at the door to her son's room, from where she could see the greasy raven locks spread on the emerald-clad, cauldron-decorated pillow, and his pale face with swollen eyelids closed tightly and open mouth from the stuffed nose, and her throat ached at the sight.

As quietly as she could, she walked over to him and ran her hand through his tresses, touching the back of her hand to his forehead to feel the slight fever he had, caressing his eyebrow and his cheek and his ear. He sighed, breathing obviously laboured, and so she pulled out her wand and cast the gentle nasal decongestion spell she'd come up with when he'd been almost three and had his first bad influenza infection. Potions worked better, of course, and normal medicine, but she didn't think he needed that, and though her spell had been barely effective when he'd been truly sick, for the congested nose from crying, it worked wonderfully. She stayed only long enough to watch him settle in his sleep and start breathing more easily, before tip-toeing downstairs in search of her husband.

She found him in their bedroom, sitting on his side of the bed, elbows on knees, head buried in his hands. Shrugging her coat off and dropping it on the chair by the door, she crossed the room to sit on his side and gently rub his back until he sighed and his shoulders drooped a little.

"I almost made an unforgivable mistake," he said quietly, more into his palms than to her. Lily stayed silent and supportive, letting him tell her in his own time, and it took him another minute or two, but he finally did manage to find the words. "He needed me to be his father, and I wasn't."

"Did something happen to him at Hogwarts?"

"No," Severus replied, finally pulling himself out of his self-imposed isolation and letting her see just how haggard he looked. "There was a Quidditch match today. Apparently, Albus tried to get me to watch it with him, for the umpteenth time. Except, he wasn't there, and someone tried to jinx Harry Potter's broom to buck him off; someone tried to harm the boy."

Lily gasped, but otherwise managed to contain her reaction. Severus' face contorted into a self-loathing grimace, and she bit her lip to keep her attempts at soothing him from coming out.

"Black and Lupin went to find the culprit, while I tried to keep Potter from falling off; Evan and his friend figured out what was going on and cast warning flares so that they collided in the air and blinded the caster of the jinx. They saved Potter's life, but I was... upset, at Albus for dragging me to the match and for having to save Potter's spawn, and at him getting involved with that boy's troubles, and..." he swallowed and pushed on, though it was costing him, she could see, "... and I took it out on him without realising how serious his separation anxiety was. He asked to know about the Stone again, even though I'm certain he knew I wouldn't tell him anything, and I said some things I shouldn't have. He became obstinate with me, mouthed off, and I... I almost... I almost hit him," he finished in a horrified whisper, eyes unfocused as they stared somewhere past Lily's left hip, and she had to swallow past her suddenly dry throat, but before she could say anything, he continued, hoarse. "Not... not like that, I would never... but I would have spanked him, smacked his bum for talking to me like that, for disrespecting me, when he... when I should have..."

"But you didn't," Lily cut him off, encircling her fingers over his bicep and squeezing just enough to pull him out of his own head. "You'd never treat him the way your father treated you, and you didn't spank him, either."

"No, I... his friend, the Muggle-born Ravenclaw girl–"

"Hermione."

"Yes, Hermione. She interrupted us, and then Albus was waiting for us at the entrance, so I let him go to lunch while I went with Albus to finalise the Stone's protections, and I calmed down enough to realise something was wrong with Evan. Albus knew, of course, he always knows when things aren't how they should be, so instead of us sitting down with Black and Lupin and discussing the attempt on Potter's life, he suggested that I see to Evan first and offered his office for it."

"What did you do?"

"I... I did what you always tell me to do," he confessed. "I asked him what was wrong. He yelled for a while before it came out. Lily, he's not handling it nearly as well as he wanted us to believe. He... he cried for almost an hour, and I know that I had compounded to it, I know I... he expected praise from me, and instead I scorned him and his actions, belittled him. He thought I believed him insignificant."

Oh, what a mess.

"Sev," Lily said, prying his fists open so that she could slip her own hands in his, "Evan knows that you love him, but emotionally he's far more alike to me than you; he only looks for duplicity and deception in people he hasn't allowed himself to trust, and he trusts you and me implicitly. And even that cautiousness he exhibits with others is more taught behaviour than inborn one. So, think about it. You've always encouraged him to think independently and logically, but now that he is, you're shutting him down, because you don't want him involved with the topic. He's too young to be able to separate your behaviour on this one issue from your general behaviour towards him emotionally, especially if his separation anxiety is as bad as you suspect. Of course it got jumbled up in his head and came out as harsher than he really believes. You need to let him know that the reason you don't want him poking about this is not because you don't think him intellectually up to the challenge, but because it is safer for him if he stays away. He'll understand that you want to keep him safe, and he'll accept it from an emotional standpoint, which is a completely different thing from an intellectual standpoint. I'm sure he knows in his head why you don't want him getting involved with this, but he needs to understand it in his heart, too."

Her husband stayed quietly in thought for a few minutes, before nodding his head and straightening his spine, obviously having come to a decision with regards to this issue.

"I'll speak with him when he wakes up. I'd rather not send him back immediately, Lily. He needs a break, I think."

"He doesn't look very well, does he," she agreed softly, thinking of the dark circles under Evan's eyes and his somewhat waxy complexion. "I wish he'd told me."

"Did you suspect anything?"

"Not more than you; he wrote about Stheno missing home, and perhaps in the last few letters, he became more direct about it, but I truly didn't think... you and I never felt like that as kids, did we? I mostly remember being upset that Petunia wasn't speaking with me, but not missing my parents too much."

"You know my relationship with my parents," Severus said. "I also don't remember any of the Slytherins in our year going through anything of the sort, though of course, it's quite possible that they'd just hidden it well enough that I hadn't noticed. His night terrors had become more frequent, as well. Kyla wrote to me at the beginning of the week about it; she said that they'd gone up to one per week."

"Why didn't you tell me that?" Lily asked, appalled at the news; they'd not been that frequent since Evan had turned nine.

"I wanted to check on him first, determine for myself how he was. Obviously, we need to manage this, because I don't think he can keep going on his own for much longer."

"Occlumency?"

Severus raised an eyebrow. "You know what that would entail."

She did, of course; Occlumency was a powerful branch of mind magic not for simply allowing the practitioner to protect their mind, but also because it allowed for artificial management of any conscious and many unconscious mind processes, as well, including emotions. Lily had nipped that idea in the bud back when Severus had started mentioning perhaps teaching Evan how to do it; knowing just how much damage improperly dealt-with emotions could create (Severus was a prime example, in fact), she refused to let her husband give her son a tool that would allow him to cause harm to himself.

Now, though, she found herself wavering on that stance. If Evan's separation anxiety really was as bad as it seemed, maybe it would be better for him to know how to box it up and dampen it so that it didn't affect his everyday obligations.

On the other hand...

"I still think it's too dangerous; he's too young for that, Sev."

"He needs to develop some coping mechanism, Lily, because whatever he's been doing since September obviously isn't working."

"I agree, but teaching him to shut down that part of his basal consciousness is just asking for trouble if he gets it into his head to keep it shut down until coming home. That'll just create problems when he's here, and in the end he still won't have dealt with it in a healthy, permanent manner. No, please don't go there with him."

"Perhaps you're right."

"About this, I know I am." Which was the truth; between the two of them, Lily was the emotional half of the marriage, and Severus was the intellectual one. She had faith in her own words when it came to emotional difficulties the same way she had faith in Severus' on the more intellectual problems. "Is there anything else that might help him?"

"Yes, but I can't start him on that until he's home for a longer time. Christmas, at least."

"Then we'll just have to make do until then," she decided, getting to her feet.

"How was your lunch with Meadowes?" naiveté

"Fine; it was nice to catch up with her." Her conversation with Dorcas could wait until she didn't need to worry about her child, Lily decided. Now was not the right time to open that discussion with Severus, anyway. "I'll take Evan back tomorrow, speak with his Deputy Head about it." She still thought Slora should have told her, or that at least Severus should have mentioned it immediately, but that fell under the 'spilled milk' classification, so she let it go.

Instead, she changed into casual clothes and dragged Severus onto the bed properly, knowing that they both needed comfort and closeness of each other.

She knew Evan would be sleeping with them tonight; after extremely emotional events, he always sought their comfort. And, though she would not have admitted it to anyone but Severus, she found herself thoroughly looking forward to it, because the truth was that she'd missed her child horribly in the last two months.

For all that she'd gone through the same thing without problems, eleven years old really seemed like far too young a time for children to be going off on their own; it made her envy those parents who had their children close until their eighteenth year.

* * *

When Remus woke up from his nap, it was to a not inconsiderable weight pressing on his sternum. A very warm weight that seemed to be blowing hot air across his side. Blinking the fogginess of sleep away, he looked down at the heavy head of the enormous black dog he was currently sharing the bed with; apparently, sometime in the past hour, Sirius had transformed and gone to sleep as Padfoot.

Though not very common, this wasn't exactly rare, either. Sirius often had trouble resting after any sort of emotional event, and though Animagi kept their minds even in animal form, there was a simplicity to the mental flow that very much reflected the minds of animals. Remus only knew this second-hand, of course; while they'd been in school, no one had thought to even suggest that he learn to transform, too, and though Sirius had started periodically pushing the idea since their gang of four had shrunk to just the two of them, Remus was not very keen on it. Sirius was of the opinion that being able to willingly transform might actually remove any pain at all; Animagi transformation were barely uncomfortable, and miles from Remus' monthly ordeals. Remus was very good at transfiguration in general, as all the other Marauders had been (even Peter; Remus had found himself looking back in the years since Peter's betrayal and finding himself startled at how little they'd truly known their once-friend, because Peter had always seemed the least competent, when he'd, in fact, been able to perform just as much complex magic as they could, as proven by his competency in turning into a rat), and both were pretty certain that it wouldn't take much effort on Remus' part to acquire that particular magical skill. No; Remus' problem lay in the fact that he knew he'd just end up as a wolf, anyway, the lycanthropy curse was far more powerful than almost any magic (and considering it permanently changed not only the magical core, but the whole body, that wasn't surprising), and the idea of having to endure that form willingly made him almost violently uncomfortable.

It had been far worse when he'd been a child. Without the Wolfsbane Potion and left to his own misery, Remus had seen his life as just one continuous torture. These days, with the Wolframite Reserve established in Cornwall as a safe haven for Britain's werewolves during their transformation and the modified Wolfsbane Potion that helped with the pain as well as allowing Remus to keep his mind during the full moon, life was far better than he'd ever imagined it could be, to the point where he didn't want to do anything to upset it.

Scratching Padfoot around the ears, Remus thought about Harry and his little group, wondering if and when they'd show interest in Animagus studies. James, Sirius and Peter (and Remus in theory only) had needed about three years all told; they'd started in their second year, and managed it at the end of their first term in fifth year. They'd done it alone, however, without any help from Minerva or Albus or anyone else, and weary enough of the punishment for not registering that they'd made sure not to leave any trail that they wouldn't need to – namely, they didn't rent books from the Hogwarts library, and were careful not to slack off on their other activities. With proper training and considering his affinity for transfiguration magic, Remus estimated that Harry wouldn't need more than a year and a half, perhaps even less.

No doubt, Sirius would insist that Remus actually give it a try when he started teaching Harry. And, though he hated the way his lycanthropy was reflected in so many aspects of his life, becoming a wolf held at least one positive value – he and Sirius would pretty much match then, considering that Padfoot looked like a cross between an extremely feral wolfdog and a Grim. He was sure Sirius would love that.

Letting out a low growl, Padfoot stirred, and Remus switched from little scritches around the ear to long pets down his spine as far as his reach extended. His friend blinked open his grey eyes and huffed, shuffling into a more comfortable position.

"Not tired, my arse," Remus told him, fisting his fur a little to get his attention. "Don't go back to sleep; I need to speak with you."

Padfoot growled again, a distinctly grumbly sound that Remus had no problem interpreting.

"Yes, now, before you get all twisted up in your work again. And switch back, so that I'm sure you're listening to what I have to say."

Also, in human form, Sirius would not be able to avoid the emotional implications of what had happened that morning. He knew transforming into Padfoot was his way of dealing with it, but it wasn't a very healthy way in the long term, and Remus had long ago decided that he found Sirius' emotional health far more important than his comfort. The man needed someone to push him into dealing with his issues, and there really was no one else who would ever have either the information they needed or the trust required to get Sirius processing his emotions properly.

The man took a few minutes to sulk, before finally his shape morphed until he was human again, curled into a loose ball with his head on Remus' chest.

"What?"

"Are you going to listen to me?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"I'd like to think you don't, but we shouldn't kid ourselves. If you wanted to avoid it, you would."

Most importantly, though, was that Sirius himself knew the benefit of coming to terms with events as they transpired, rather than letting it pile up until he felt like the world was falling apart, a lesson very harshly learned. That was why he always suffered through these talks with Remus, even though he never failed to grumble and complain.

He sat up and ran his hands through his black hair, before sighing the sigh of the mentally weary, and Remus sat up properly as well. This needed to be done properly.

"All right; I'm listening."

Taking a moment to order his thoughts, Remus spoke: "You said that you feel like you're stealing Harry from James when he calls you his da." By the darkening of Sirius' visage, the man had been hoping that they'd skip over this talk. Still, he stayed silent and attentive, and for that, Remus was grateful. "I know that you don't want him forgetting about James and Mary, Sirius. I know, and I understand. But you've been his parent for the last ten years, and acknowledging that will not make James and Mary's importance in his life any less. They gave birth to him, they loved him and they died for him. But _you_ are the one who's made sure that he is clothed, fed, that he has a roof over his head, that he knows right from wrong and that he knows there is someone to take care of things that are beyond his abilities. If James were alive, you'd be Harry's favourite uncle figure, but he's not, and you stepped up when James needed you to do so. Do you think James would care more if Harry was a happy, well-adjusted child or if he thought of you as his father?"

"I'm not stupid, Remus, I understand what you're saying. That doesn't change the fact that I feel like I'm doing wrong by him," Sirius snapped back.

"I think part of it is some impossible wish for him to feel towards James the way you feel. That's simply stupid, Padfoot. Harry will never be able to grieve James and Mary the way that you and I do, and trying to force it on him by distancing yourself from the position you hold in his life is simply cruel. The fact is that Harry was far too young to feel the same loss that you, who had been like a brother to James, feel, and begrudging him that, even if it's unconscious and aimed more at yourself than at him, is not a good thing, so you have to figure out a way to reconcile yourself with who Harry is to you – your _son_ – and not try to make Harry hold James to this concept of a person who would have been the perfect father, had he just lived. You know that's not true; James was far too self-absorbed to be a perfect anything, and he would have made just as many mistakes as you did. But he wouldn't have wanted you to think of him as perfect, either. He was self-absorbed, but he wasn't self-delusional. He knew his failings as well as anyone. And I think that by telling Harry only the very best of him, you and I have forgotten about that, too, that he was a person of flesh and blood, who'd done some stupid things, some bad things, and some very wise and good things, too, and he'd be the first to tell you that you're being an idiot about this and to stop feeling like you're stealing anything from him. For Merlin's sake, he'd given you Harry in his will, hadn't he?"

"Yeah, he did," Sirius confirmed, though it was obvious to Remus that he was trying to convince himself of it far more than anything else. Guilt churned his stomach somewhat as he remembered the many, many times they'd told Harry stories about their school days, stories about his parents and the war. And in all of them, James had been the unquestionable hero who'd always triumphed in his endeavours. In those stories, he could do no wrong.

They'd been telling those stories for themselves as much as for Harry, to keep James and Mary alive in some little way. But, Remus had forgotten how big an influence such things had on a person; where he himself could never forget James' less presentable moments, because one visit to the Snapes and he'd be instantly reminded, Sirius had had no such anchor, and a far larger incentive to only remember the good; James' and Sirius' bond had been one of the strongest Remus had ever seen, certainly as strong as that between Lily and Snape, and even ten years later, he was still grieving, in a way Remus wasn't. He'd not truly paid attention to this, had let it slip past him, because the last time Sirius had lost almost all control, and it had been so very easy to spot. This was a different sort of problem altogether, but no less important to be dealt with, and soon, before more damage was done.

"All of this, I think it's influencing Harry in a negative was, as well," Remus told his friend openly. "I think that we've talked about James' adventures so much that Harry feels like he has to live up to them. He went after that troll on his own, and you heard him talking about it; I don't think it crossed his mind even once that he could have truly been killed. Same with the Cerberus. Even what happened today, I honestly don't think he understood just how close to death he came. For him it's just another adventure worthy of his father's memory."

"You really think that's what he thinks?"

"Probably not consciously," Remus allowed. "But subconsciously, I'm certain he's at least partially influenced by that. After all, everyone always says that he looks so much like James, and he takes pride in acting like James, as well. But the only thing of James that he knows are stories that don't carry the full truth. He needs to know about the bad things, too. Not... not the worst things, the bullying and the bigotry and the hatred, not yet. But there was a reason why he never turned Lily's head, and why it took him so long to win Mary over, why you know he wouldn't have been the perfect father. Harry needs to understand that emulating James is not going to win him any true points, not even from us who've put the idea in his head in the first place. And to do that, we need to be honest with him, to the extent that his age allows us. And for _that_ , _you_ need to accept that Harry's reverence towards James will most likely dissolve, or at least morph into something less... idealistic."

Sirius sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, before giving Remus a somewhat poisonous look.

"You know, you treat me with kid gloves when it comes to James; you've done that ever since... well. And I've let you, because... because it still bloody hurts, that James is gone, but I'm not a complete idiot, Remus, and I'm not twenty-three years old anymore. I know bloody well who James was, and you know very well that I tried not to turn Harry into him. And, if you haven't noticed, I was as frightened for Harry as you were today, so yes, if you think us telling him about our misbehaviours during school contributed to that, of course I'm bloody well going to try and remedy that."

"Good." And it was, because annoyed or angry Sirius was a determined Sirius, and so long as he wasn't moping or moving towards his depressed periods, Remus knew he would stand by his word. "Then you'll stop with this foolishness about you stealing him from James, yeah?"

"I'll work through it," his friend promised with the grim determination of someone seeing a losing battle but going in nonetheless.

"Good. Then there's just one more thing."

"Which is?"

"I think it's about time we saw to making some portraits of James and Mary, don't you think?"

* * *

A/N: I am so sorry that this is so very, very late. Life is starting to get quite crazy, but I'm hoping I can keep the update schedule of this story at least consistent until the end (at a chapter every other week or so).


	16. Ch 15: The Contents under Pressure

**Chapter 15: The Contents under Pressure**

The end of November heralded the preparations for the end-of-semester examinations, and the school hunkered down with the arrival of December and the cold Scottish winter. Study groups sprang up from the first to the last year, and both children and professors became more irritable as the cabin fever set in.

The exams were not a big deal as such; mostly, they were relatively simple tests to make certain that the children were at expected levels and on track for the next semester. Even so, they did require some revision of the learned material, no matter how much Christmas and the winter holidays were on children's minds.

Harry, who had never been a very studious person to begin with, found himself thoroughly hating any and all need to repeat what he'd already learned. Unfortunately, Remus had told him that good grades were the condition for him hearing of some of his father's old pranking schemes, and for once, Sirius was less than supportive on the subject. In truth, he sounded very distracted in his letters, to the point where Harry was tempted to ask Remus what the heck was going on at the Auror Office and whether his godfather was on some big case. It had happened before, of course, and he didn't fret, knowing that Sirius would be making up for it as soon as he had some free time on his hands (and those were always the best days of Harry's childhood).

So, Harry had gotten his three friends and wrangled Padma Patil into helping them out, which had naturally drawn her friends Morag MacDougal and Mandy Brocklehurst, as well as the ever-inseparable Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown into the mix, until they'd ended up inadvertently forming their own study group of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws. It wasn't too bad; the boys hated learning as much as Harry did, but with such a mixed group of Muggle-raiseds, Magical-raiseds, and people with strengths in different areas, it didn't take Harry and Padma long to organise who'd be helping whom with which subjects, and the studying was going mostly well.

Bushyworm Granger and the Slimysnake (which was, admittedly, not as good as Lord of Grease, but would do in a pinch) were studying by themselves, or occasionally either with two Ravenclaw boys Harry didn't know very well or two Slytherins who sometimes tended to be found with the Slimysnake. On one memorable occasion, even Neville was at their table, though he had appeared even more subdued and nervous than Harry was used to seeing from him. That was mainly why he'd not approached Granger for the study help but Padma, who was definitely more brainy than her twin and who seemed to genuinely enjoy the Marauders' company.

By the time the first snow fell in mid-December, Harry was thoroughly sick of all the studying, and was itching for something fun to do. Flying was out – the brooms, even top-of-the-line ones, didn't particularly enjoy freezing conditions, and he had no intention of causing casual wear-and-tear to his Nimbus 2000 – and the last prank he'd pulled had been back in November on Malfoy, for his stupid comments about him being replaced by a wide-mouthed tree frog on the team ( _that_ had been a prank worthy of the Senior Marauders, Harry thought; having green sparks fly out every time Malfoy mentioned the Quidditch match or Harry or the House points – and who even cared about that, anyway? – was very entertaining when the Slytherins were still sour about their cheer being what helped Harry catch that Snitch). When the Weasley twins got detention for charming snowballs to bounce off the back of Quirrell's turban, Harry called it quits on studying and put his mind to something more productive.

Namely, the mysteries of who might have tried to knock him off his broom, where the Marauder's Map had gotten to, and what the heck was being hidden on the third floor.

The day after the Quidditch match, when he'd had time to enjoy the exuberance his friends felt for Sirius and Remus, Harry had talked to everyone that he knew at school, and the information he'd gathered on who might be at fault for the incident was sparse, since most of the people had not been looking around them, but at the players. One thing, however, had stood out, courtesy of Seamus, who'd had the good sense to have binoculars with him during the match.

"There was a man dressed in all black, in the very back of the stands, and he was staring at you without blinking and his lips were moving," he'd told Harry the day after the match. Harry, who'd grown up with the member of the House of Black, knew enough about Dark Magic to know that this was extremely suspect; he had no clue what sort of curse or jinx could have tampered with his broom, but it had to have been very powerful, and keeping eye contact while chanting some complicated spell sounded right up that alley. The man hadn't appeared at the school afterwards that they'd seen, but they'd all decided to keep their eyes and ears open (Harry would have written to Sirius about it, except the two Aurors from the Hallowe'en incident were back and sniffing about, so he thought that Sirius knew even more than Harry did and would definitely not share – talkative or no, Sirius was very serious (pun intended, of course, as always) about confidentiality when it came to the official AO business).

They still had no new leads on the Map, though Harry did consider Ron's brothers prime suspects on that account. They managed to pull off far too many things without getting caught for Harry not to be suspicious. Unfortunately, aside from going right up to them and asking them, there was no way they could figure it out, because if they _did_ have the Map, then they'd know Harry and his friends were stalking them, and if they _didn't_ , it'd be a massive waste of time that the boys didn't have. No, the best thing to do would be to find out all that he could about the map from Remus first, and then see if any of that information would be useful in tracking the bloody thing down.

As for the third floor, Dean outright refused to go back and check on the door, but Ron and Seamus were up for it, so they'd decided to go wandering that way just as soon as they were certain the Aurors weren't close by to see them.

The presence of the Aurors had ended up being even more of a big deal than the first time; after all, the first time it was very obvious someone would come see where the troll had come from, and Harry had even gotten to speak with Tonks for a few minutes, and knew this was just a training exercise for her, as everyone was certain the troll had just accidentally ended up in the castle. _This time_ , however, the matter was completely different; in addition to the scarred Auror (whom everyone called Mad-Eye, on account of his creepy glass eye, and whom Sirius admired) and Harry's sort-of-cousin Tonks, there was another wizard present, a tall, dark-skinned man with a shiny, bald head and a hoop earring in one ear, who looked some years older than Tonks, but was definitely still in his twenties.

The first thing the Aurors had done Sunday morning after the match was interview Harry in Dumbledore's office about the incident, and Harry had told them what he remembered, which wasn't much (Seamus had only later on mentioned the black-clad man, so at the time, Harry had honestly not had a clue who might have done it). Sirius had been with him during the interview, and had later told him some stories about Mad-Eye Moody that had had Harry sniggering all through the morning.

After that, information on what the Aurors were trying to do became sparse, though Harry did learn several days later that they were looking into all of the people present at the match and that they were considering the attempt as a tie to Voldemort's supporters, which was at the same time a little scary and very freaking annoying. Still, they didn't approach Harry anymore and were mostly gone from Hogwarts after that following week, leaving a blaze of rumours and gossip after them, but no definitive answers (they still showed up from time to time, though, possibly just to feed the rumour mill).

Then the studying started up, and only now, the Saturday a week before their exams were about to start, did the three boys find themselves oh-so-accidentally wandering past that statue of the ugly woman behind which the stairs to the third floor were.

To say that Harry felt disappointed when he found himself stopped by some invisible barrier was understating it.

"But it worked the last time!" Seamus exclaimed.

"I bet they figured out it was there and warded it off," Harry muttered. "I wonder how they'd figured that out?"

"Maybe someone else also wandered this way," Ron suggested. "I'm sure Fred and George were curious enough to come through, and if they have the Map, they probably know about the staircase."

"We could go stake out the main entrance, see who comes through. Someone has to feed that thing."

"Probably Hagrid. You know, the groundskeeper?" Harry told Seamus as they walked towards the entrance to the third floor corridor. "Sirius always says that he likes dangerous animals, and a three-headed dog would be right up his alley."

Naturally, Harry was right on that account; around lunchtime, Hagrid appeared in their sights and surreptitiously (or what passed for it when it came to the half-giant) entered the warded corridor. The boys strained to listen for any clues, and were rewarded with the indistinctive rumble of Hagrid's voice as he no doubt spoke to the beast.

"Is that music?" Seamus asked, frowning.

"I don't hear anything," Ron replied, leaning forward. "What kind of music?"

Harry couldn't hear anything, either, and just shrugged his shoulders as Seamus shushed them.

"Huh. Sounds like some sort of whistle or a flute or something."

"You sure you're not hearing things, mate?" Ron asked him, receiving a venomous look in response, but in the end Seamus let it go without further comment.

Hagrid emerged several minutes later, and Harry sprang out of his hiding spot in the alcove, trying to appear as casual as he could while approaching the man.

"Hi, Hagrid!"

"Harry!" the half-giant exclaimed, looking a little startled and trying to cover it up rather badly. "What're yeh doin' here?"

"I lost one of my mittens," Harry improvised, "thought maybe I'd dropped it somewhere around here. Have you seen it, maybe?"

"A mitten? No."

Turning to walk with Hagrid, Harry turned to his friends, who'd emerged from the hiding spot discretely. "Haven't found it?"

"No, mate, sorry," Ron said with a shrug. "Maybe it's back in your trunk? That thing's a mess."

"Like yours is any better," Harry shot back with a roll of his eyes, before turning to Hagrid (or, well, looking up; Hagrid was _tall_ ). "So, did you go see the three-headed dog, too?"

Hagrid dropped the bloodied bundle of what had to have been wrapping for the meat he'd fed the Cerberus.

"How do you know about Fluffy?"

" _Fluffy_?" Seamus asked in horrified fascination as Hagrid bent down to pick up the rubbish he'd dropped and they all continued on their way down the staircase.

"Yeah. He's mine, bought him off a Greek chappie I met in the pub las' year. I lent him to Dumbledore to guard the–" And he fell silent, to Harry's complete frustration. _They'd been so close._

"We thought so," Ron agreed almost sagely, earning himself an incredulous look by Seamus. "It's good that something that fierce is protecting it, yeah?"

"What do you know of it?" Hagrid asked, peering down at them somewhat suspiciously. In response, Harry shrugged.

"Nothing much," he said honestly. "D'you think the person trying to steal it is the same person who attacked me at the Quidditch match?"

"Yeh listen to me, Harry. Don' go lookin' fer trouble. The Aurors will figure out who made yer broom act like that, an' you forget that dog an' what it's guardin'. That's between Professor Dumbledore an' Nicolas Flamel–"

"Who?" Seamus piped up, and Hagrid clammed right up on the topic. Harry shot the Irish boy a stern look, but any further attempt to probe for more information was waylaid as they entered the Great Hall, where they found McGonagall and Flitwick decorating with several other students, most of them no older than third years. There were twelve enormous Christmas trees all around the room, and holly and mistletoe hung all around the walls, with some decorative icicles, candles, balls and other types of decorations already there, though it was obvious the thing wasn't nearly done yet.

"Ah, Mr Potter," McGonagall called out. "Would you like to help us decorate?"

"Do we get extra points for spellwork?" he asked instantly, dropping his bag at the end of the Gryffindor table and approaching the two professors.

"Perhaps an extra one or two on your examination," Flitwick allowed, and Harry grinned. Transfiguration _was_ one of his favourite subjects, and he didn't mind any chance of showing off how much more he knew than his other classmates.

"Can I just have my lunch right quick, first?"

"Of course, child," his Head of House answered with some amused exasperation. "The Great Hall will still be there to decorate in a half hour."

Grinning, Harry hurried back to his friends, so that they could quietly confer on what Hagrid (who'd left just as soon as the boys were otherwise occupied) had told them.

They needed to find out who Nicolas Flamel was.

* * *

The five weeks that passed after Evan had his breakdown and his father carried him home like a two-year-old were some of the worst of his life. He'd thought that being home would help, but it actually made everything worse – when it had been months between the times when he saw his parents, he could somehow trudge on by telling himself how much time was left, but now that he'd been home and had had to go back the very next day, he felt completely miserable.

This was not helped by Malfoy's constant remarks on the amounts of presents he'd be getting and the Yule Ball that was being organised by his family this year – usually, there was at least one Christmas gala held by someone who could afford it, and only the _crème de la crème_ were invited, which meant that all the boys except Evan would be going, as well as at least half of the girls – or by the fact that suddenly, Potterprat and his gang were _constantly_ in the library, usually in the company of Hermione's dormmates.

"God, but they're annoying," his best friend huffed one day as the group raised their voices. "There are perfectly acceptable classrooms where they could do their studying, and instead they inflict their _noise_ on us!"

Evan agreed; Tracey had already said that she wanted them to move if they were to continue studying together, and Theo had taken one look at them and promptly walked back out of the library. The one saving grace was that they all appeared too involved with themselves to take much notice – or much action – against Evan and Hermione (and whoever else was there with them).

Even so, after three weeks of miserable weather, badly slept nights, night terrors and having to suffer the presence of that group, Evan was feeling far too tired and cranky to be in a good mood at all, and was mostly sustaining himself with the thought of 'ten days, ten days'.

A week before their half-year examinations, Evan was forced to invite the shy Gryffindor to one of their study sessions. Neville Longbottom, Evan's partner in Potions Class this year, was rattling apart at the seams, and seemed to be going from bad to worse in their class. Considering at least part of his own reputation depended on Neville's performance, he judged it better to suffer a little more of the boy's frankly irritating demeanour, than to admit he'd not done what Slughorn had expected of him.

"Mi, this is Neville Longbottom, he's my Potions partner," Evan introduced them when they met in the library. "Longbottom, this is Hermione Granger, my best friend and study partner. Longbottom needs some help with Potions."

"Oh, we know each other," Hermione said with a friendly smile. "Hi, Neville."

"Hi," the pudgy boy whispered. "We met on the train, after your cat helped find Trevor, my toad," he clarified at Evan's confused look.

"Oh. Well, good."

"Is Tracey coming?"

Evan shrugged. "How should I know? I'm not her keeper."

"Well, did you at least tell her that we're doing Potions today?" Hermione asked pointedly. She was stressed, too, and most days, they barely managed to get through their study sessions without biting each other's heads off.

"No, why would I tell her that when I've been sharing our study information with her for the past two weeks," he shot back.

"Maybe I should–"

"No, you sit your bum down at the table," Evan ordered, and Neville released a meek little noise and did as he was instructed.

"Don't mind him," Hermione told the Gryffindor, trying to put him at ease. "Underneath all the doom and gloom, he's actually nice."

"Hermione, shut up," he told her. "Now, come on, we don't have all day; I'd like to be done sometime this century."

The girl huffed but indulged him, and so began one of the most frustrating study sessions of Evan's life. Not only was Neville far too unnerved to truly pay much attention, Tracey showed up half an hour later and Hermione barely got her to sit down with them when she saw the Gryffindor, her mysterious hatred of that House's members making her almost hiss her anger at Evan, who returned it in equal measure.

It was a good thing his friends could give as good as they got, because he had a suspicion he'd be without friends by the start of the holidays otherwise.

One benefit of having Neville at their table showed up late in the day while Evan was explaining a rather tricky bit of temperature control for the Herbicide Potion to the other three.

"It needs to be quick, but not too quick or the Horklump juice will cause it to congeal. But, if you don't turn down the heat after you add the first Flobberworm mucus measure, the whole thing will start bubbling, and the potency goes down."

"But why?" Tracey asked. "It says in _The Theory of Potion-Making_ that most thickening substances lower the temperature of potions, and I know I saw the Flobberworm mucus on the list."

"It's because of the Horklump juice, Davis," Evan answered, barely constraining his growl. "Horklumps used to be native to the northern parts of Europe, they're adjusted for cold climates. Unprocessed juice that we use for potions contains substances that help them keep their temperature up, and those are the ones that interact with the Flobberworm mucus and have a cumulative effect."

"Oh! That makes sense!" Neville exclaimed, his first loud observation since they'd started. "Horklumps are easiest to kill with heating spells."

"Because they already have ways of heating themselves internally, and any more would just overheat them," Hermione finished his thought. "Good point, Neville."

"And what do _you_ know about it?" Tracey sneered at him, making Neville cringe inwards.

"I... my gran has a greenhouse that gets infested sometimes."

"Neville is near the top of our class in Herbology," Hermione pointed out primly, the way only she could. "He knows what he's talking about."

So, they ended up inviting him back for their plant study session, where, though he seemed to know what was being talked about, Neville remained quiet and unnerved, and by the time the last Potions class before the exam came, Evan was feeling less than charitable towards the boy.

Perhaps that was why he kept snapping at him even when he shouldn't have, which resulted in Neville becoming even clumsier and more scared throughout the brewing process, which only exacerbated Evan's own behaviour, until he said something to the effect of Neville having no brains or some such, and Neville outright knocking half of the ingredients into the cauldron in one of his uncoordinated movements, which ended up with the whole thing exploding in their faces.

Suffice it to say, that was not the way Evan had wanted to see his parents come winter holidays, though by then, he was desperate enough that he would take what he could get.

* * *

After six weeks, there was nothing more to be discovered about the incident during the Quidditch match in November. To say that Alastor was displeased would be an understatement, and Albus was feeling much the same. The fact that someone had had the gall to outright attack one of his students practically under his nose was not something borne lightly, but the fact that they seemed to have gotten away with it was intolerable.

"The problem, Albus, is that no one seemed to notice anything wrong in the first place," Alastor told him some days before the winter holidays were to begin. "We've gotten a reasonably reliable list of attendees, but only a few of them had noticed Potter's broom behaving strangely, and of those, even less attributed it to anything but a defective broom."

"The truth is, Headmaster," Kingsley Shacklebolt spoke with his deep voice, "if Sirius and his group hadn't noticed something wrong in the first place and worked to counteract it, the attempt could have easily been a success given the tampering with the protective enchantments on the pitch."

That had been one of the most chilling bits of news Albus had gotten in the days following the Quidditch match, that the protective enchantments had been tampered with, making the risk of Harry – or any other child, for that matter – crashing to his death suddenly a much higher one.

"I..." Nymphadora spoke, falling silent for a moment when all eyes turned to her, before barging on. "I think he'd have been fine; Sirius did say that it was Harry's classmates who'd shot those warning flares, so they had obviously noticed. Besides, Professor Flitwick was a duelling champion, I know how good his reflexes are. He would have cushioned Harry's fall."

"Your point being?" Alastor demanded.

"Well, just to say that this might not have been done with the intention of killing him, per se. Maybe just to intimidate him, or to harm him in order to draw attention from something else?"

"Obviously, the perpetrator was confident that they wouldn't get caught, with legitimate reason," Kingsley drew the conclusion. "It is not impossible that there was a secondary motive to harming a child. Perhaps Potter was simply the most convenient person? After all, we all immediately assumed that Voldemort's supporters were involved because of who Potter is; perhaps Trainee Tonks is right."

"What about memory retrieval?" Albus asked. "After all, Pensieved memories are viewed from a third-person perspective; it is possible someone had subconsciously noticed something."

"Our hands are tied unless people willingly give their memories," Alastor reminded him with a growl; he didn't like this any better than Albus did, but they couldn't work outside of the law, that much was obvious. "We're not getting anything of the sort from most visitors, and we don't even know who'd be most likely to have noticed anything."

"Besides, memories are considered unreliable evidence when it is not something consciously noted," Kingsley added. "Most everyone was extremely focused on the match."

That was true, as well; the accuracy of the peripheral events depended on the natural perceptiveness of the individuals in question, as well as their level of magical ability. The minds of witches and wizards were extremely tied to their magical cores (which was why mind magics existed and were so powerful in the first place), and Albus knew better than anyone that memories were tricky things at the best of times. This was a long-shot in any case, but with so many people not even realising what had been happening right under their nose, there was little chance for the Aurors to learn anything.

"And Harry's broom?"

"Snape's counter-jinx completely distorted any sort of magical imprint the jinx might have left," Alastor said. "We gave the broom back to the boy."

"In other words, we have nothing."

"Pretty much."

Albus sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, where his glasses were resting and leaving dents. He considered Quirinus and the possible reason he might have to want to get the Philosopher's Stone, debated with himself whether he was the one who'd tried to harm Harry. In the end, that truly went contrary to everything he'd always known about the young Ravenclaw; he'd been a relatively decent professor before his sabbatical, whom children had accepted, if not outright liked, and Quirinus had seemed relatively satisfied with his position, until that last year before the sabbatical. Whatever he'd found during his travels – and he truly needed to look into that; hadn't Minerva said he'd mentioned travelling to Albania to Horace? Coincidence, perhaps, but Albus had not come to where he was by believing in coincidences – had obviously changed him in noticeable ways, but he didn't think it went as far as allowing him the morals to outright attempt murder of an eleven-year-old child, no matter who that child was.

Then again, if his travel to Albania _was_ no coincidence, and, furthermore, if he'd found what he'd been looking for in that region, then there was no saying what he now thought as morally reprehensible or not.

But that was a question that needed pondering, and at least some evidence; Albus wasn't interested in forming assumptions out of thin air.

"Thank you for telling me all of this," he told the three Aurors. "I will let you know immediately if there are any further developments. All further Quidditch matches will be closed for the public for security reasons until the culprit is caught, and I'll have my professors briefed as to your investigation, so that they can be prepared should something like this happen again."

"And the wards?"

"Not before summer holidays, unfortunately. Regulus Black has already raised this point with the Board of Governors, and the Council of Supervisors agrees. Unfortunately, that requires a completely empty school, and there are students staying over both the winter holidays and the Easter week in the castle."

"Then we don't have anything more to do here," Alastor concluded, getting to his feet.

"Happy Christmas, Alastor, Auror Shacklebolt, Miss Tonks."

"And to you, Headmaster."

When he was left alone, Albus centred his mind and reached for the ancient construct of the school's consciousness. Her strange sentience responded in a comforting croon, opening herself up to his inspection, both of the usual wards intended to protect students and the wards he'd put on the third floor corridor entrance.

Hogwarts' magic was complex beyond measure, ten centuries old and layered, sentient enough that it could evolve in ways it judged best to protect its inhabitants, a magical fulcrum point that gathered magic from the world around her. And she'd known Albus for a hundred years, longer than any other person she'd ever known, ever since he'd crossed the threshold of her outer wards as an impressionable eleven-year-old. Not many could sense her, and it took years and years of practice and familiarity to be able to actually communicate with her in any meaningful way, but Albus had always been persistent, and after becoming her headmaster, she'd grown more willing to open herself to him in this way.

She disliked the presence of the Philosopher's Stone; its magic was of an artificial kind, one that was not found in nature, the pinnacle of alchemical success, but one that distorted the world around it in ways that disagreed with all the laws of magic. The Cerberus and the troll were of less concern to her, though she seemed pleased with the wards he'd placed to keep those creatures away from children (and children away from them).

And something else that bothered her. Albus frowned, probing deeper. Something foul on the edges of her senses, but also something that was familiar enough to her that she'd not alerted him to it, and didn't seem inclined to fight it. So, not truly dangerous, just unpleasant. It was not the first time something like that had snuck in, and usually Hogwarts had ways of dealing with it herself, so Albus let her to it. She'd reach out to him if it turned out to be something requiring his intervention.

Settling back into himself, he opened his eyes and gave some consideration to what further steps he'd need to take with regards to Quirinus' possible allegiances. Then, that decided, he summoned a parchment and a quill, and began writing.

He was nearing the end of his missive when Hogwarts' dull alert tugged on his consciousness. Half a minute later, one of the dungeon portraits, a stately-looking wizard wearing robes popular in the seventeenth century, ran into Armando Dippet's frame.

"There's been an explosion in the Potions classroom; two students have been taken to the hospital wing, a Gryffindor and a Slytherin."

"How serious is it?"

The portrait shrugged. "Your professor assured everyone it is not serious, but the children were not awake when they were transported into the hospital wing."

"I will be there presently."

It seemed that this school year was one thing after another. And so close to the winter holidays, too.

Well, nothing for it; his duties beckoned.

* * *

Evan woke up in the hospital wing with a murderous headache, and couldn't keep a pained groan from escaping (actually, it might have been a moan, but he wasn't about to admit to _that_ ). In what seemed like eternity, Madam Pomfrey approached his bed and forced him to drink a foul-smelling potion he identified as a Pain Reliever. The moment his headache went away, he felt almost heavenly, and actually gave a shot at opening his eyes.

"How are you feeling, Mr Snape?"

"Ugh. What happened?"

"Neville Longbottom exploded your cauldron. You were close enough not only to inhale the fumes, but also to suffer from the blast. Both Mr Longbottom and you were transported here this morning, and you've been here for about six hours."

That's right, he'd yelled at the insecure Gryffindor, even though he'd known that'd just make the boy even clumsier than usual. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

"Your parents will be here during visiting hours, and you are not to get out of the bed for the next two days, until I determine if there are any long-term poisoning symptoms."

"But, the exams–"

"You will be able to complete your exams when you return from the winter holidays," another voice said, and Evan swung his head around to look at the Headmaster, who was sitting in a visitor's chair by Neville's bed. He regretted the speed of his movement, though, as in the next moment his headache made a rather painful protest.

"Ow. Professor Dumbledore."

"Those exams are far too stressful to be worth the trouble," Madam Pomfrey said with a huff. "Rest, child, and don't hesitate to call for me if you are in pain."

"I will," he promised, most of his attention still on the old Headmaster. "What are you doing here?"

"Two of my students were hurt; should I not be visiting with you?" Dumbledore asked, his eyes twinkling as he dug through his pockets for that lemony candy he liked so much.

"But... it's not that big a deal. Potion mishaps happen all the time."

"True, though they usually don't result in children being unconscious for six hours and more."

Evan gave up; he didn't have the mental capacity to process anything, anyway. He just wanted to go home, so badly tears sprang up to his eyes. He stared up at the ceiling and blinked almost violently, trying to drive them away without letting them spill, which just resulted in his nose getting runny instead.

He wanted to go _home_.

"Evan, why didn't you come to me?" Dumbledore asked quietly, and Evan was startled to realise that the old wizard had gotten up and walked up to his bed. "You should not suffer your pain in solitude."

"I don't want special treatment because of my dad," he explained. "And I'm not alone; Hermione helps."

"Ah, yes, your Ravenclaw friend. She truly is one of the brightest students of your year."

"She's bloody brilliant... pardon the language. She's top of our class for almost everything."

"And as for special treatment... Evan, you are not the first or the last student to suffer extreme homesickness. There are ways of helping you through it that are not any kind of special treatment."

"Sure," he agreed, a little listlessly. "But you already allowed me to bring Stheno, and if everyone knew..."

"Ah. I tend to forget the ways in which Slytherin House functions. Very well, my boy. But, in light of current events, both you and Mr Longbottom will be allowed to take your mid-year exams when you return from the holidays, and will be going to your homes once Madam Pomfrey discharges you."

"Special treatment."

"Yes, it is," Dumbledore confirmed with a smile. "But then, I think you've earned it, don't you? After all, Horace hasn't had such a gifted student since Damocles Belby."

"Only because he was too prejudiced to notice Dad," Evan answered loyally, earning himself a conspiratorial smile from the old wizard.

"As true as that is, I think we should keep it between us, wouldn't you agree?"

"...Yeah, definitely."

As much as he hated the way Slughorn seemed to be compensating for his miss with Evan's dad by putting the first-year in such a spotlight, the man wasn't altogether a very bad instructor, and certainly far better at dealing with average students than Evan's dad would ever be (as Evan had personal experience on both points, he felt competent in making that judgment).

"Rest now, my boy, and remember that you will be going home in a few days."

"Yeah," Evan agreed, swallowing the ball in his throat with difficulty. He was going home early, and would have a longer holiday than anyone else. It was something, at least.

Dumbledore gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder and turned to exit the hospital wing with one last warm smile.

"Wait!" Evan blurted out when the man was almost at the door. Dumbledore turned back to him with a questioning look, and Evan felt his cheeks heating in embarrassment. "I... why did you want us to leave the Great Hall at Hallowe'en?" came out in spite of his doubts.

"Ah, yes, you'd caught that," Dumbledore said, sounding surprisingly proud of Evan. "What do you think?"

"That it has something to do with the third-floor corridor. Dad said not to go anywhere near it," he hastened to add, lest he get another lecture on the subject.

"I assure you, Evan, that I would have done no such thing if I had known that the troll was not where it had been reported as being."

"I know," he hurried to assure the Headmaster. After all, Dumbledore was many things, but he cared greatly for the safety of the students, of that he was sure. "I just meant... I'm right, aren't I?"

"If I tell you that you are, will you do as your father instructed and let it go?"

Well, it wasn't like he had much choice on the matter, anyway.

"Yeah. Thank you for indulging me, sir."

"Do not ever think that you will be punished for thinking for yourself," Dumbledore replied. "I just hope that you remain aware that certain things are beyond your current abilities, and to leave such things for adults who are trained to deal with them."

"I understand."

"Excellent, my boy. I will see you when your parents arrive."

And with that, he was gone from the hospital wing. Sighing, Evan turned away from the door and nearly jumped in surprise when he noticed Neville in the other bed was running his hand down Stheno's spine and all the way to the tip of her tail; every time he did, she lifted her posterior in ways so unique to all cats.

"You... I didn't realise you were awake," he admitted.

"Yeah," Neville whispered. "Professor Dumbledore spoke with me."

Evan cleared his throat, disliking what he was about to do but knowing it needed to be done. "Listen, Longbottom... Neville. I'm sorry for saying all those things to you. They're not true; you're not stupid at all."

"I... Thanks. I understand, I think. Professor Dumbledore explained."

"What _exactly_ did he explain?" Evan asked, feeling his hackles rise at the thought of something so personal (that he'd managed to hide from even most Slytherins) just being shared like common knowledge with people he did not want knowing anything about it.

"That you're homesick," Neville answered. "I get it. Sometimes I feel like that about my parents."

His parents. Evan thought about it, frowning lightly. His parents weren't well; a Death Eater attack had left them mentally hurt, and from what he remembered overhearing from his mum, the healers had managed to get them to a state where they thought they were children. Helping them was one of Severus' long-term projects, because Evan's and Neville's mums were such close friends that they'd been godmother's to each other's children, but he didn't think there was much happening there.

He decided not to go asking Neville anything about it; the boy was subdued enough without Evan contributing to his mood, and besides, that went contrary to what he was trying to do.

"I won't tell anyone," the Gryffindor boy promised, finally locking eyes with Evan. "I promise."

"Neville. Listen. If you want... maybe next semester, we can ask Professor Slughorn to use one of his other laboratories, and you can practice your brewing? I'm sure you'll get better with practice."

"Oh, no, that's not necessary. You've helped me enough already."

"No, I haven't." And that was the truth; he'd been resentful about getting stuck with the clumsy boy all semester, and that was no more Neville's fault than it was Evan's. His mum would be very unhappy with him if she knew, especially after she'd asked him specifically to be nice to her godson. Evan and Neville had known each other from early age, that was true, but for reasons he wasn't privy to, Evan's mum had never really insisted on them spending time together, so their theoretical connection through their mothers had remained just that – theoretical, rather than practical. But that was no excuse for Evan's intolerance of the other boy's difficulties. "I could have done much more, I'm sorry."

"You didn't want to have to help me, I get it."

"Yeah, but that's no excuse. I'll make it up to you."

With a soft 'mrew' sound, Stheno slid from under Neville's palm and jumped off his bed to climb onto Evan's, where she began rubbing her full body length under his chin and purring like a lorry, nearly smacking him with her tufty tail in the eye. Unable not to smile, Evan scritched her under her chin, instantly feeling better now that she was there to give him comfort.

He had no idea how he would have survived the last four months if he'd not had Stheno with him.

"She's very pretty, but I don't remember her from the last time I came over to yours."

Smiling at the other eleven-year-old, Evan settled more comfortably in the bed.

"Yeah, I only just got her for my last birthday. There was another cub that I could have gotten, a male that was this pretty golden-brown colour, but then she walked up to me and started trying to climb my trousers..."

He spent the rest of the evening in surprisingly enjoyable conversation with Neville about Stheno and the other boy's toad, Trevor, so that by the time Hermione, Tracey and Theo came to see him, he felt like he was finally finding common ground with the Gryffindor boy. It felt surprisingly good, all things considered, to think that he might have made yet another friend, and in that house to boot. He thought Neville wasn't too opposed to the idea, either.

Two days later, he Flooed home with his mum and dad, and found himself crying in relief when he was finally able to spend a lazy afternoon on their couch with his mum, watching the old Granada Sherlock Holmes series in expectation of the new episodes starting up at the beginning of next year, while his father read a potions journal in the other chair.

He was finally, _finally_ home.

* * *

Sirius was in the process of packing his things at the office on Saturday, the 21st of December, when the light blue missive flew in and landed on his desk. Huffing, because he was on a schedule, dammit, and didn't have time to deal with the latest screw-up of the underlings, he reached for the paper and unfolded it to see what the problem was this time.

Three minutes later, he was barging into Rufus Scrimgeour's office with said missive in his fist, saying: "What in the name of Merlin's soggy balls is this?"

His boss gave him a perfunctory look before continuing with whatever paperwork he was currently reviewing. Already pissed, Sirius didn't even try to contain his ire as he smacked the notice down over whatever the heck Scrimgeour was working on, so that the man had to acknowledge him. "It's _Christmas_ , for fuck's sake! Harry's coming home after four months! I have no intention of going to _Bosnia_!"

"Did you, or did you not, defer the holiday shift last year to Shacklebolt, Black?" Scrimgeour asked, glaring at him for having the audacity to interrupt him.

He had, as a matter of fact, but the full moon had fallen on New Year's Eve, and the reserve where Remus usually had a spot for that night had been closed, which had meant that Sirius had had to do some creative shuffling when it came to who'd be taking Harry in while he'd helped Remus through the night. Kingsley Shacklebolt had magnanimously given up his own days off to help Sirius out, which Sirius had promised to pay back this year.

"Yes, but I didn't sign up for being out of the freaking _country_ for that time."

The case was a manhunt for a British wizard who was wanted in several other European countries, and who was last reported being quite involved in exacerbating the unrest of the Balkan region among the local wizarding populace. The most frustrating thing was that no matter how high-profile the case was (which it was and which was why he, as the most senior Auror on staff during the holidays, had landed it), it would require him, as a representative of the British wizarding authority, to spearhead the manhunt and bring the man back for trial. The missive he'd received were travel arrangements for early Monday morning by International Portkey, less than two days from now.

Harry was due to arrive home later today by Hogwarts Express. The problem was that the full moon was tonight, too, meaning Remus would be indisposed until the very moment he'd be leaving to spend the week with his father, whose health had deteriorated enough to make the old man actually asking for Remus to stay with him a while, an event that had not happened once since Remus' mother had passed away. Sticking Remus right after the full moon and his ill father with such a rambunctious kid as Harry was not something Sirius could do, not when he was hoping the time together would facilitate some sort of permanent reconciliation between the father and son. Andromeda had agreed to take him in for the night, as Sirius had already planned to be with Remus during the transformation as was their standing agreement, but he couldn't very well ask her to keep Harry over Christmas, to say nothing of the fact that that was unfair to Harry, as well, to be delegated to a branch of Sirius' family with whom he had little contact. The Weasleys were travelling to Romania to visit their son, and Sirius didn't know the families of Harry's other friends nearly enough to entrust Harry's safety to them. Lily was out, too, with the way Harry and Lily's boy didn't get on, and Regulus was taking his family to the Swiss Alps right after tonight's Yule Ball. And there was no way he was asking Augusta Longbottom for anything, not with the way she still resented him for taking Neville from her and putting her through the indignity of a supervised custody mandate after her brother nearly drowned the poor boy when he was three.

The easiest thing, of course, was to bring him back to Hogwarts on Sunday evening, and be done with it, but for that, he needed to see Albus and let him know what was going on. He didn't really want to do that, however, because Harry had been sounding excited about coming home and seeing him and Remus over the holidays, and greeting Harry at the station with the fact that he'd be turned right around and sent back the next day, after having to spend the night at Andromeda's, seemed far too cruel, especially in light of his recent talk with Remus about Harry's reckless tendencies.

Sometimes he really thought Scrimgeour hated him, because he couldn't find any other way to explain some of the things the man had done to Sirius in the last few years.

"Consider this, Black; if you get Edgerton, you might actually get that promotion you've been vying for."

"You think a promotion is more important to me than Harry?" Sirius asked, incredulous. "Do you even _have_ children?"

"You're overstepping your bounds, Auror Black," Scrimgeour warned him. "If it is truly such a problem, I can assign this to Robards; he's been chomping at the bit for recognition."

" _Rob–_ no, you know what, I'll do it, because you and I both know my closure rate is seven percent higher than Gawain fucking Robards'." Sirius said irately. "The last thing we need is for you to be showing your favouritism for all and sunder and then have the man fail to get this done. But you better pay up, or we'll be having problems, Scrimgeour. And I want a trainee next season," he said as a parting shot as he swiped the missive from his boss' desk and marched himself out of the man's office, swearing in his head all the while.

Not only was Mad-Eye tight-lipped on what he'd found out about the attempt on Harry's life, but now all his holiday plans were ruined, too.

 _Happy fucking Christmas to you, Padfoot._

* * *

Seamus disembarked the Hogwarts Train in Falls-by-Cambus, a wizarding village in the vicinity of Stirling, where his mum picked him up to Apparate back to his hometown of Athlone in Ireland, leaving Harry and Dean to ride the train alone for most of the way back. They amused themselves by talking about the latest scandal that graced the cover of the _Daily Prophet_ – namely, that the International Magical Sporting Authority had, yet again, refused to allow Quidditch to be admitted as a Magical Olympics sport even though most of the wizarding world adored it, supposedly as the game was considered not only 'patently unfair in its points system' on account of the fact that catching the Snitch could easily turn the whole game around, but also lacking any proper timing method (which was, admittedly, a somewhat valid point when one considered that the Magical Olympics were an event with severe time-constraints).

"At least Quodpot also didn't get accepted," Harry muttered as he scanned over the article.

"Only because no one else in the world plays it, other than the Americans," Dean helpfully pointed out. "And you gotta admit, Harry, Quidditch rules _are_ quite ridiculous. It's like... like..." he stalled a moment, obviously trying to think of an analogy, before having that 'a-ha' moment when characters in cartoons had a light-bulb appear above their head, and continuing, "like you, me and Seamus playing football, while Ron plays chess and it doesn't matter what we do, we'll be winning either way if Ron wins. That's not fair at all."

"It's not always like that. If the other team has more than hundred and fifty points lead, they'll still win."

"Well, sure, but how often does that happen? In essence, you need a very good Keeper and a very good Seeker, and you're all set. Granted, the Bludgers are a problem, but even a semi-competent Beater can keep them away from two players."

Harry looked at him, scandalised. "Do you have any idea how much strategy goes into a good Quidditch game?"

"Yes, yes, but why should I _care_ about whatever all other players are doing, if it all comes down to the Seeker?" Dean answered, getting more animated. "If it was, say, fifty points, the rest of the game would be much more important, but with hundred and fifty, your goal has to be, one, to keep the other team from being hundred and fifty points ahead of you, and two, that you end up being more than hundred and fifty points ahead of them. And I, as a spectator, always watch only what you're doing, because there's no true point to following the game, when what they do hardly matters."

"Sometimes it does," Harry loyally defended one of his biggest passions.

"Once in a blue moon," Dean dismissed. "Besides, if your team is more than hundred and fifty points down when you see the Snitch, all you've got to do is make sure the other Seeker doesn't catch it, and wait for your team to score enough points. Again, it comes down to what the Seeker does. It's an unfair balance of roles in the game."

Harry gave up on the conversation; Dean was never going to give up football as the best game ever, and Harry was never going to give up Quidditch as that, either, so they'd just end up wasting all of their time on a discussion where they'd not be able to agree on anything.

"What are we going to do about Nicolas Flamel?" he asked instead.

"I can see if there's something about him in the Muggle world, but I doubt it," Dean said with a shrug. "You could ask your uncle."

"Remus? Nah, I'm sure if Sirius knows about whatever it is, then Remus knows too, and he'd just end up telling Sirius, which would just end up with him telling me not to concern myself with it."

"I thought your guardian would like to know that stuff."

Harry shrugged. "Well, Dad and Sirius and Remus did a bunch of stuff, but they never really tell me the stories that make them broody and sad, so I figure they'd just telling me the good ones, and I imagine this whole thing with the three-headed dog is more like those stories than the ones they tell me, which means they'll just end up trying to keep me from figuring it out. It's better not to ask."

"If you say so. I just hate being in the library so much."

"Me, too," Harry commiserated.

"If only we could skip that whole research part, right?"

This time, Harry himself felt like the light-bulb had clicked on. "You know, you're right. What we need is someone to do it for us."

"Like who?"

Standing up, Harry tossed the forgotten newspaper onto the opposite seat. "Come on; we need to find Bushyworm."

"Hermione? Huh, not a bad idea," Dean praised, and Harry answered with a self-satisfied grin.

It took them a few minutes to find her compartment; when the entered, the two boys from Ravenclaw that she sometimes spent time with were there with her; surprisingly, Snape wasn't. She offered them a congenial smile and invited them in, the other two boys barely paying them any attention, as they were in the middle of some sort of heated debate. Harry shook his head and motioned towards their own compartment, and after a moment, Hermione excused herself from the two boys and joined them in the hallway.

"Do you need something, Harry?"

"Yeah, I wanted to ask you about something, but I'd rather not do it out here in the open. Can you come to our compartment?"

"Sure."

They walked back in silence for a minute or two, before Dean piped up, apparently overcome with curiosity.

"Where's Snape?"

"Oh, like you care," Granger answered with a roll of her eyes. "And it's none of your business, anyway. Don't think I didn't notice you dumping the treeful of snow on him two weeks ago."

"That wasn't us," Harry protested. "It was the Weasley twins."

"Don't lie to me," the girl shot back. "I know for a fact he's friends with them, and they'd have told him if it was them, like they tell you and Ronald."

"Why do you even care about him?" Dean asked her. "He's nasty."

"He's my best friend, and if you're going to insult him, I'm going back to my compartment."

"Fine," Harry agreed, finding it more important to see if she knew anything about Flamel than to talk about Snape of all people. He waited until she sat down across from Dean to shut the door firmly behind him, sealing them in a relative bubble of privacy. "So, we were wondering if you know who Nicolas Flamel is?"

Granger's face turned puzzled, and she shook her head.

"No. Who is he?"

"We don't know," Dean explained. "That's why we're asking you."

"Have you heard of what's on the third floor?"

Hearing this, the girl straightened in her seat, wild hair flying about her face as she scrutinised Harry.

"He has something to do with it, then?"

"You know something," he countered. "You tell us yours, we tell you ours."

"No, you brought me here; you first," she shot back. Damn, but that sounded very much not-Gryffindor to him; he'd forgotten he wasn't dealing with one of his own House.

Well, it wasn't like he had much of a choice. At least he was reasonably sure that Granger would keep her word.

"All right. We know that, whatever it is, it's behind strong wards that we can't cross. But, we did find a secret way there, and there's a three-headed dog guarding a trapdoor."

"A Cerberus?!"

"We're reasonably sure that whatever it's guarding, it has to do with Nicolas Flamel, and remember that break-in at Gringotts in July? Well, I saw Hagrid remove a little package from that vault that very day."

"We think whatever it is, it's hidden under that trapdoor."

Granger blinked in obvious shock a few times, no doubt trying to process this, and Harry found himself feeling smug that he'd manage to stun her so effectively.

"What do you know, then?" Dean asked.

"Well, Evan and I didn't know about the Cerberus, but we did know that there was something being guarded there. We also think that someone let that troll on Hallowe'en in on purpose, to create a diversion so that they could try and get whatever's hidden there."

"But, didn't the Aurors determine it was an accident?" Dean asked.

"Well, either the thief is very good at creating plausible diversions, or Dumbledore told them to say it," Harry said with a shrug. "I don't think it matters, anyway. What matters is that Ron and I did hear someone going that way while we were looking for you, Granger, and it sounded like a woman."

"A woman?" Granger repeated. "Are you sure?"

"Why would it have to be a man?"

To this, she had no answer.

"So, can you help us figure out who Flamel is? Then we'd know what's on the third floor, and we'd be that much closer to figuring out who the thief is."

"I suppose," she said, though sounding doubtful. "I don't think we should, though."

"Well, when someone is willing to put the students at risk," Harry countered. "That troll almost killed and ate you."

"I never did thank you for that, Harry."

"Hey, you lied for us to the professors, that makes us even in my book."

"All right, I'll look into who Flamel is, but only under the condition that you tell your guardian as soon as we figure it out. Don't go doing anything stupid by yourself, all right?"

"Why would you care?" Dean asked, honestly confused. "We're not really friends."

"Because it doesn't matter what I think of you, I still don't want you to get hurt," Granger answered, getting up. "I'll see you after the holidays?"

"Of course. Happy Christmas."

"Yes, Happy Christmas," she threw back as she disappeared down the corridor, leaving Harry and Dean to close the compartment door after her.

"Well, who would have known, that actually turned out pretty well," Dean said with a smile.

Harry only nodded and picked up a chocolate frog to stuff in his mouth as he turned this new information in his mind. Who'd had the opportunity to let that troll in, anyway?

* * *

Flooing into the old Headmaster's office for who knew which time that year, Sirius wasted little time on pleasantries and instead dropped into that ugly yet strangely comfortable visitor's chair and accepted the man's offer of tea. It did wonders for his fraying temper, if nothing else; it wasn't coffee, but it was black and strong, just the way he liked it.

"What was so urgent, Sirius?" Dumbledore asked, after taking a sip of his own tea, something smelling like lemons. Really, the man was obsessed with lemony things.

"I need to go out of the country on Monday, and there's no one who can look after Harry for half of his winter holidays," he explained, rubbing his eyes with the thumb and finger of his left hand. "The full moon is tonight, and Remus is visiting Lyall right after for a week, which is rare enough in itself when it's only a day – you know how those two are. I don't want to do anything to disrupt that, but it does mean I don't have anyone to take Harry in for most of the holidays."

"So you wish him to stay? As far as I know, he is on the train right this moment."

"I know; I'll bring him back tomorrow if that's all right with you. Ron Weasley is staying at Hogwarts, and I do think he'll prefer that to all the shuffling I'd otherwise have to arrange in what short time I have before I need to leave."

"It is no problem at all," Albus assured him. "I will make certain Minerva and the house-elves know to expect him. If I may inquire, are you traveling for work?"

"Of course I am," Sirius said, snorting in annoyance. "What else do you think would be able to get me away from the holiday season with Harry? Bosnia, of all places."

"Indeed."

"I looked into the political climate of the region earlier today. It's a complete mess, Albus, a powder keg of nationalism and itchy wand hands and warring Muggle factions. And I'm supposed to find one man in all of that."

"I'm certain you will manage with minimal difficulties," the old man said loyally.

"As grateful as I am for your vote of confidence, I'd much rather take something actually useful. Do you have contacts in the region, someone who'd be able to point me in the right direction? I'm looking for Niall Edgerton."

He could almost see the wheels start turning in Dumbledore's mind, the way the Headmaster sharpened at the name.

"Yes, I believe I can help you with this; getting you out of that region as soon as possible would be the smartest course of action."

Sirius sighed.

"What is it you need of me, then?"

Albus offered him one of his seemingly benign little smiles that never failed to make Sirius want to roll his eyes at the man; really, there was no need for him to pretend to be grandfatherly with the Auror, when Sirius had seen what Albus was capable of back when he'd been an impressionable nineteen-year-old Auror trainee just itching for an Order mission.

"I wonder if you would be so kind as to make a stop in Albania on your way back; it is within Apparating distance of Bosnia."

"And what would I be dong in Albania?"

"Meeting with an old acquaintance of mine, and hopefully finding out what Quirinus had been doing in the region this time last year."

At the name of that incompetent man, Sirius straightened.

"Isn't Albania where the last rumours placed Moldyshorts? You don't think that idiot had gone to search for him, do you?"

"I don't know, Sirius; that's why I'd like you to go and see if you can learn anything about it."

"You don't think he had something to do with Harry's attack?" Sirius ask, voice hardening at the thought of Harry's teacher being responsible.

"I don't believe it likely," Albus answered, "but I obviously cannot be sure of anything. I would like to think that no professor would ever harm a student of this school, but as you well noticed, Quirinus has returned much changed from the eager young man he had been before his sabbatical, and I find that my mind needs assuaging as to this change."

"I'll look into it, but you better make sure that he's not after Harry, or I'm taking measures."

"I understand. Now, tell me what you know of Niall Edgerton's current activities, and I will give you any information I have that might be of assistance to you."


	17. Ch 16: The Christmas Hols

**Chapter 16: The Christmas Hols**

The Hogwarts Express arrived at seven-thirteen in the evening at King's Cross station, and Harry let most of the kids disembark in all their rushing, choosing instead to peer out the window in search of the person picking him up. He found Andromeda Tonks standing a little to the side of the Apparition point, far enough away from the main crowd not to get overrun by children and their parents, but still obvious enough that he could see her.

She was a beautiful woman, certainly, reminding Harry quite a bit of his pseudo-cousin Alya Black, Sirius' niece; they both had regal features typical of the Black family, though Andromeda's hair was a far lighter shade of brown than Alya's black. Harry always imagined her as the prettiest of the three Black sisters; he'd never seen any pictures of Bellatrix Lestrange, of course, but he'd heard more than once that Alya looked startlingly like her, so it was not hard to imagine, and he'd caught a glimpse of Narcissa Malfoy in September when she and her husband had been dropping off Malfoy at the station, so he knew about her light colouring, the blonde hair and blue eyes (she also had the expression as if something was constantly stinking under her nose, which really spoiled her whole face, making her in Harry's mind far less pretty than Andromeda). He liked that Andy was in the middle, both age-wise and appearance-wise, because it always amused him how she was the one who ended up being thought of as the most rebellious of the three.

Finally, when the crowd thinned a little, he and Dean got their backpacks (Cybèle safely in her cage by his side) and disembarked, waving to each other as they went in different directions. Andromeda smiled at Harry warmly when she spotted him making his way to her, and he answered in kind, running the rest of the way to stand in front of her.

"Hello, Harry."

"Hi, Andy! Thanks for picking me up."

"You're welcome. How was the trip?" she asked him as he stepped forward to receive a hug from her.

"It was fine; Seamus got off in Scotland, so it was just Dean and me coming back, because Ron's parents went to Romania to see Charlie."

"Yes, Nymphadora's mentioned that he is working with dragons," Andy confirmed. "Steady now."

And with a twist, they Disapparated away from the station and to the Tonks home in High Wycombe. Andromeda held Harry firmly while he got his feet about him, for which he was grateful; he wasn't too bad at Side-Along, but it did always leave him dizzy enough he would have easily fallen otherwise.

Ted waved at Harry from the dinner table, where he was sitting and reading a book. He was the only person in Harry's immediate surroundings who was on the heavier side (well, aside from Slughorn, but then Harry wasn't very fond of _that_ professor anyway), being a little pot-bellied, and his hair was a sandy colour that went towards blonde. Harry liked him almost as much as he liked Andy, as he always listened to Harry's stories and was generally one of the nicest people the eleven-year-old had ever met.

"Sirius will be by to get you in the morning," Andy said, waving her wand to send his backpack and outerwear to the guest room upstairs as soon as Harry had shed them, while the child was busy releasing his snowy owl out into the night through the window. "There's something he wanted me to let you know, however."

"Yeah?"

"He's being sent to the continent on Monday, unfortunately," she explained, herding Harry looking at her incredulously, towards the table, while Ted levitated the supper in front of him. "He doesn't think he'll be able to come back by the time your holidays are over."

"But... but we were supposed to do Christmas together!" Harry exclaimed, his spirits sinking at the news. He'd been so looking forward to spending time with Sirius; though he'd not been homesick, per se, he had missed his guardian quite a bit.

"Believe me, kiddo, he was as unhappy about it as you are," Ted promised. "His boss is not a very lenient man, and from what I understood, this case is very, very important."

"He wouldn't have accepted otherwise," Andy assured him. "You'll spend the day with him tomorrow and stay here afterwards, and on Monday morning, I'll take you back to Hogwarts."

"Why can't I stay with Remus instead?" he asked. Whined, more like, but in his defence, he was tired from the long trip, and had just learned that all his holiday plans were completely ruined.

"Remus is going to spend the some time with his father, Harry, as I'm sure you know his father is ill and doesn't need you underfoot, and Dora's finally gotten a few days off, so we had already planned to travel before Sirius' trip came up," Ted said, kindly enough that Harry couldn't very well yell at him for it. "But, as I understand it, your friend Ron Weasley is at the school, so it won't be a completely wasted holiday, yeah?"

"I guess," he grumbled, though there was nothing much to say on the subject otherwise, when things seemed like they'd been arranged already. He wished he could just wait Remus out, but they were never going to let him stay alone for that long (or with Milby, their house-elf, since she was far too busy with the Potter Estate and wasn't a babysitter besides, not to mention the question of security risks and Harry's safety that couldn't be placed on her), and it seemed like he couldn't go anywhere else. If that was the case, Hogwarts was as good a place as any to spend Christmas (though he promised himself that he'd give Sirius hell for this; the man had _promised_ ).

Harry spent the evening regaling Ted and Andromeda about his adventures at Hogwarts and bragging about his spellwork, promising to show them how good he was at transfiguration in the morning, but by the time he finished his supper, he found his eyes drooping closed; the day had been a long one, after all. He stayed just long enough to catch Dora come in the front door, her hair bubblegum pink. She greeted him with her usual exuberance, nearly tripping on the umbrella holder by the front door, and promised to be there tomorrow afternoon so that they could do something together. Satisfied for having extracted that promise, Harry went to the guest bedroom and fairly dropped in his bed.

Then he remembered that Dora was one of the Aurors trying to figure out who had tried to jinx his broom, and suddenly he was wide awake again.

There was a nifty little charm that could silence his footsteps, _Quietum Solum_ , and Harry used it on himself as he snuck back downstairs. He crept up to the kitchen door and leaned against the wall, close enough to hear what they were talking, but far enough that he could easily run back upstairs if they suspected him of eavesdropping. They spent some twenty or so minutes talking about their day, the usual boring variety of everyday talk that served well to almost put Harry right to sleep where he stood against the wall, so that he almost missed it when they changed the subject.

"What does Sirius say about it?" he heard Andromeda ask, and the question made him snap to attention. He'd missed the topic switch in the conversation, but hopefully he'd not missed any more than that.

"We can't exactly tell him anything about the investigation," Dora answered, far too quietly for her usual voice level. _Bingo_ , Harry thought. "But I'm sure he's realised by now that it's stalled. I mean, how it's possible that almost no one noticed someone continually casting for at least two minutes is beyond me, because that was no ordinary jinx." She sounded quite irate about it, too, which made Harry smile; blood or no (and they were, in some distant, who-the-heck-cares kind of way), the Tonkses were his favourite relations.

"Dark Magic?"

"Oh, definitely. At least it helped us rule out most of the students. Mad-Eye thinks that the level of intent needed to power it had to have been great, which means someone who had a pretty strong grudge against Harry."

"Not necessarily," Andy commented. "Very skilled Dark casters are able to use strong emotions from all sources, not only those tied to the target of their casting. Certainly Bella was proficient at it, even before joining You-Know-Who."

"I know, which is why I was thinking that there might have been a secondary motive to it. Maybe they targeted Harry _because_ he's the Boy-Who-Lived, to deflect attention. I'm not sure if Mad-Eye agrees, but I figured, at this point, we haven't much to lose anyway. There is the fact that someone's tampered with the protective spells on the pitch, but we're not sure to which extent this was done, whether they would have completely malfunctioned or not. Even so, I doubt the fall would have been a fatal one either way; all the faculty would know to be on guard after what happened with our Chaser last year, though possibly the culprit wasn't aware of the increased scrutiny given to all the Quidditch games. I don't know, I just don't think it would have been as effective as some other Dark Magic, though obviously it was unnoticeable enough that we're at a standstill."

"Well, the culprit had to have known that placing Harry in danger would bring down the Auror Office on the school," Ted pointed out. "After all, it's public knowledge that he's living with Sirius, and that Sirius is an Auror. So, why do it in the first place?"

"That's why we're thinking that it's one of the visitors, rather than anyone residing at the school," Dora answered. "It'd be too risky, when there are other ways that could have made it look like an accident. Which, again, makes me think that the point was to get us to Hogwarts, rather than kill Harry."

"Has anything unusual happened this year, other than this incident?"

"Well, the only other thing I know of was the troll, I told you about that, but that was an accident."

"Maybe," Andy said, in tandem with the sound of scraping chairs – she was standing up, no doubt. "You'll need to pack warmly; they're predicting very low temperatures on the continent."

As quietly as he'd come, Harry snuck back to his room, head buzzing with this new information. He couldn't help but think of what Granger had told him on the train earlier today, about the troll possibly being a diversion for someone to get to what was on the third floor. If the Quidditch incident was tied to that, and it seemed reasonable to think so, then he needed to find out who the man in black was, that Seamus had told him about, because that person had something to do with him being almost knocked off his Nimbus, and perhaps they would be another way of figuring out what was so important about the third floor.

It just remained to be determined whether whoever had jinxed his broom had wanted the Aurors to hinder Professor Dumbledore, or the thief trying to steal Nicolas Flamel's whatever-it-was, and he was sure he'd know which one was correct as soon as he figured out what that whatever-it-was actually was.

Perhaps it wasn't so bad after all, that he was going back to Hogwarts come Monday.

* * *

" _Legilimens._ "

The intrusion was not a gentle one; his attacker placed considerable force in the first push, but his shields held, battered though they were. He flung up a recent memory that came to mind, of deciding whether to sit at a different table for the Hallowe'en feast, and the attacker was momentarily distracted. It gave him time to gather what thoughts had leaked and put them behind his second line of defence, just in time for the first, robust shield to break. The second, so-called primary, shield was a spongy thing, built out of his interest in his studies and his love for reading, emotions that soothed him and comforted him. The attack was much more precise this time, but the first attempt sank into the primary shield and got stuck in it, for a second. Knowing his only chance, he pushed back, concentrating his force on expanding the shield until it almost edged the intruder out. Then one kick, and he was free.

Evan's head throbbed, and he winced as he massaged his temples. Then strong, calloused fingers took over, and he released a sigh, leaning into the touch with his eyes closed.

"That was very well done," his father said as he soothed the throbbing away. "Better than I had expected."

"I hate my stupid head," he grumbled. "Will it hurt every time?"

"It'll get less as your first and primary shields become stronger, but yes, having an intruder in your head will always hurt."

"But it doesn't if I let them," he pointed out, remembering the initial lessons, three years ago. He'd happily let his dad walk around in his mind as they tried to figure out the best way to raise his Occlumency shields, after he'd learned to empty his mind ( _that_ particular endeavour had taken good four years). His father had started him on his Occlumency training when he was only four years old, after his night terrors had begun; as Severus had expected, they'd calmed drastically after Evan had managed to partition his thoughts and emotions behind his initial fragile, wavering shields, those that mostly came easily to him now. His mother had forbidden them from exploring the segment of the mind magic that dealt with dampening the feelings altogether, a step necessary for true mastery of Occlumency, but even segregating what he was thinking and feeling – compartmentalising his mind – gave him some measure of assurance when it came to the night terrors.

Or had, until he'd gone to Hogwarts.

"Which you must never do."

Right, the free mindwalking.

"It's a good way of communicating," he pointed out. He'd had a phase, when he was nine, where he'd not felt the need to speak at all, but had projected it at his father (or, well, thought it very loudly while looking at him, but in hindsight, it sort-of translated). Severus hadn't been pleased, because Lily had gotten concerned, and had very demonstratively refused to use the Mind Art on Evan, thereby forcing him to use his voice instead, but it _had_ served him well in that he'd figured out a way of ordering his thoughts and amplifying them enough to be noticed easily by a Legilimens. Of course, his father had threatened to forbid him from brewing if he tampered with it further, but Evan was secretly working on it still.

"We have had this discussion, Evan," his father said pointedly.

"Fine," he grumbled but didn't push. "So, what do you think we should work on?"

"You need to learn to conceal the primary shields. Think about the memories that would be least likely to lead past them. If you know your enemy, you can use memories that would be uncomfortable for them."

"So, make them a shield for a shield."

"Yes, though the final result should be of concealment, rather than robust protection. In fact, if you are aware of what your attacker is looking for, you can lead them on a merry chase with the false memories, while keeping the true ones behind your second line of defence."

That sounded practical. Also, dangerous.

"What about using a symbol instead of memories? My book mentioned that it was sturdier protection than memories."

"Only if your symbol does not directly tie to your most important thoughts," Severus explained. "The biggest danger in using mundane memories and thoughts as defence is that, if you are not careful, they can lead your attacker back to those you wish to protect. By using a symbol instead, you might create a dead-end, which is almost impossible with mere memories. However, finding the right symbol takes time and much trial-and-error. I had intended to cover this with you over the summer."

"Which defence do you use?"

"Both," his father said with a small smirk. "It depends on who is likely to peek into my mind. Albus, for instance, rarely goes past my symbol defence and accepts what I let out. Others would have taken it for a... challenge, let us say, so using memories became a safer option."

Evan bit his lip in order to stop himself from blurting out something he knew he'd regret; Severus was most likely talking about You-Know-Who, and if there was one thing his father didn't talk about, it was the meetings he'd had with the Dark wizard during the War. Even if Evan burned with curiosity to know at least _something_ about it.

"With the memory defence, the ability to modify and even fabricate one's own memories is usually crucial for its effectiveness. Fake memories cannot lead to anything. More importantly, using fake memories to give the attacker what they're searching for can fool them into thinking they've Legilimised you successfully when they haven't. We shall have to see if you have any talent for memory manipulation."

The heavy-sitting feeling of dubiousness made Evan think that this would be one area of the mental magic in which he'd not taken after his father. He _hated_ disappointing the man.

"Now, I want you to read this book," his father said, pulling out a little package from his pocket and enlarging it with a wave of his wand, "and when you do, we will go through the first practical exercise before you return to Hogwarts."

Evan carefully unwrapped the simple brown paper, and felt a wide smile steal over his face when he read the title of the book: _The Mind Arts, Volume 2: Legilimency_. His mother had once said that those books that did not have silly alliterative titles were those that were usually by far the most useful. The Mind Arts collection was not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, but it was bluntly straightforward, well-organised and dead useful.

And Legilimency? Oh, yes, he'd been on pins and needles about starting this part of his mind magic training, not least because if he could figure out how to turn his thought amplification into thought _projection_ (which Legilimency should be able to allow, with a fair amount of tweaking and experimentation), then there was a good way of creating something approaching telepathy, even with someone not skilled in Legilimency (with the usual caveats that came with Legilimency, of course, such as eye contact and spellcasting).

"Thanks, Dad!" he said, looking up. Then he blinked in surprise as he realised that his mother was standing by the door to the study, smiling indulgently at them. "Hi, Mum."

"Hello, darling," she greeted him, moving to sit by him on the couch.

"Now, put the book away," his father said, and Evan's heart dropped into his shoes, because he knew what was coming.

The dreaded talk.

When he settled in his seat and gave Severus his full attention, his father leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and locking eyes with Evan.

"Why didn't you let me and your mother know that you were homesick?"

Evan looked down at his fingers twisted around each other in his lap, and tried to find a way to articulate everything he'd been feeling since September. It didn't help that he remembered vividly their last conversation of the kind, when he'd yelled at his father and then had a hysterical attack of some sort, that his father had carried him home through the Floo even though it was the middle of the term.

His mother's hand began rubbing his back encouragingly, and he tried to find something to say, because as much as he didn't want to talk about it (and _couldn't_ tell them certain parts, like Potterprat's gang's bullying or Malfoy's occasional indirect jeers about his night terrors), he also did, if only because he knew they'd know how to make it better.

"I didn't want to be a baby."

"Oh, honey."

"Everyone else is doing it too, and _they_ have no problem with it!" he said bitterly, clenching his fingers in his lap. "I hate it."

"I know you do, and we'll work out a way get through it."

"I wish there was telephones at Hogwarts," he muttered. "Letters aren't good enough."

"There may not be telephones, but there are fire-calls," his dad pointed out. "But even that won't work if you're not honest with us, Evan. We need to know what is wrong in order to help you through it. Your Deputy Head of House told us about the night terrors. We need to know about these things, Son."

"I hate it," Evan snarled viciously, jumping to his feet and clenching his fists at his sides. "I hate my stupid nightmares, and I hate my stupid head and I hate my stupid homesickness! Why can't I be like everyone else?!"

"Thinking like that is pointless," Lily told him, taking his hand in both of hers. "It is much better to focus on solutions, rather than regrets, Evan. So, let's find a solution together, and you'll see that the rest of the school year will be much better than it's been so far."

"Promise?" came out of his mouth, whispered and pleading. Evan hated himself a little for needing that reassurance.

But, his mother didn't waver, and didn't disappoint him, either. "I promise."

And, in spite of everything, he found himself fully believing her. After all, she was his mother, and mothers always knew best.

* * *

Harry spent Sunday with Sirius, and to his godfather's credit, the man didn't give any indication that there was anything at work pulling on his attention. They went to London and got presents for everyone, and Sirius was even good enough to wait outside the store while Harry found him a present, so that he'd be surprised when he opened it (well after the actual holiday, unfortunately, but they both avoided the pink hippogriff in the room and didn't mention it). He told Harry that Remus might come visit him at Hogwarts on New Year's if Sirius wasn't back, but that it had been a somewhat harder month and that they'd all have to postpone their planned Christmas Day activity – namely, visiting his parents' grave. They'd gone last year, on the tenth anniversary of their deaths, though usually they only went for their birthdays – 27th of March and 28th of April. When Harry had been little, Sirius and Remus hadn't wanted to spoil such a festive holiday, but considering the anniversary last year, they'd decided that the date should be honoured. The truth was that Harry felt relieved that they'd be skipping it this year, because he loved Christmas, and though he'd liked sharing it with his parents in whatever way he'd been able to, visiting the grave had made both Sirius and Remus very sad, which had put quite a damper on the rest of the day.

In the afternoon, Sirius took Harry to the London Eye, and they had fun trying to locate from the air all the wizarding areas tucked away in London's prominent neighbourhoods (they weren't observable from Muggle London, of course, but the magic was almost visible to witches and wizards, so at least they could say that _something_ magic-related could be found there-and-there). Then they went to dinner and to see _Beauty and the Beast_ , the newest Disney film – Sirius had never been very much into Muggle things, entertaining or otherwise, but Remus had always insisted that Harry should be familiar with the Muggle world (Sirius told him that Remus' mum had been Muggle, and that this was his way of honouring her, since she'd died so young), and so Disney productions were something of a trend in their home. While he found the whole romance aspect of the story somewhat boring, Harry did find himself enjoying the songs and stupidity of Gaston, whom even Sirius found funny (especially in that song about him, and the scene where he ended up falling into mud and getting a piglet on his head). Also, the fact that the film had magic that was powerful enough to turn people into talking teacups and clocks and candlesticks did rather appeal to both of their wizarding sides. The battle at the end was exciting and absolutely hilarious, and the conclusion satisfyingly dramatic that they left the movie theatre in good spirits, debating as they did on whether there had been a wizard involved with the production.

At the end of the evening, Sirius dropped Harry off at Andromeda's, wished him a happy Christmas, promised to let him know as soon as he was back, and Disapparated to get ready for his early morning Portkey. Harry finished the evening playing Exploding Snap with Dora and Ted, Andy taught him a spell to animate the decorations on the wrapping paper, and the next day, he was back at Hogwarts to Ron's great delight.

"You've got to see what I've found," Ron told him as soon as his brothers had finally left them alone.

"Something about Nicolas Flamel?"

"What? No, I've not looked for him," his best friend dismissed. "I tried getting to the third-floor corridor again, but it's still blocked. So I went looking for another way in, and I found something really bloody cool. I'll show it to you just as soon as we can sneak that way without anyone seeing us."

"Oh, but I found out loads of stuff," Harry said, dragging Ron to their dormitory, where they'd have the privacy for him to share all that he'd learned. It took him a while, since there was plenty to explain – Bushyworm's information on the Troll Incident, what he'd overheard Dora think about the Quidditch Incident, and how he thought the man in black was at the centre of it. Ron set up the chess set and they played a match during his explanation, because Harry knew that Ron always thought best when he didn't think straight at the problem but focused on something else instead, and there was no better distraction for the redhead than wizarding chess. Harry was passable, but only because Ron's late grandfather had taught them both as kids and so he'd been playing it for years. Mostly he tried to make the game as unpredictable for Ron as possible, to at least make it fun.

"Did you think to ask Tonks about the man in black?"

"Of course not," Harry said, sending a look meant to convey 'are you mad?'. "She'd just clam up and demand to know why I'd not mentioned it before, or even worse, ask why I'd been eavesdropping. Besides, if they don't know that we're looking into it, then they can't stop us, can they?"

"True."

"So, d'you think it more likely that it was about Professor Dumbledore or the thief, that I was attacked?" Harry asked.

"I think Professor Dumbledore," Ron decided after a moment of deliberation, pointing his rook forward three spots to threaten Harry's knight. "Cause the Aurors were already here once before, when the troll was let in, and we agreed that that was done by the thief as a diversion."

"So the thief was probably already spooked from that," Harry finished the thought. "But wouldn't they want to keep a low profile, then?"

"Or they'd want to use the Aurors to get Professor Dumbledore to move whatever's hidden. I mean, you gotta be really smart to break into Gringotts and get out without being caught," Ron pointed out. "Bill told me some about working for goblins, and they're bloody nasty about thieves. _But_ , it's been four months already, and the thief's still not managed to get to the thing here at Hogwarts."

"Oh, so maybe it's so difficult to get to it that the thief would rather risk getting caught, if it would mean that Dumbledore would move the thing to some other place! Oh, I hadn't thought of that. That's a brilliant idea! Risky, though," he decided with a shake of his head. "I'm the Boy-Who-Lived, and there'd be hell to pay if they got caught."

"Yeah, but it's sure to get the AO's attention," Ron said with a shrug. "And as you said, the investigation went nowhere, so they know what they're doing, at least."

"Making it more likely that it really is the thief in the first place. We need to figure out who Nicolas Flamel is, Ron! Then everything will make far more sense."

"Sure, but it can wait a few days," his best friend said, stuffing a Chocolate Frog in his mouth. "It's Christmas, and there's no one in the castle; it'd be too suspicious for any outsider to be here _now_ , so I'm sure they'll not try anything."

"Yeah; we'd notice strange men in black loitering around the school _now_."

And so they let the whole thing slip from their minds. Two days later was Christmas Day, anyway, and that meant presents, so both boys found themselves far too occupied with more pleasant activities than digging through dusty books.

Mrs Weasley gave Harry another Weasley jumper (this one in sky blue that matched his eyes with a golden Snitch on the front), and he bullied Ron into wearing his, too, over Ron's continued moaning about his being maroon _again_ (Harry _loved_ the jumpers, because that was the most maternal thing he usually got, and it meant he could pretend that he had a sort-of-mum, at least for the holidays). Hermione, surprisingly, sent him a large box of Chocolate Frogs with the card of his parents stuck to the front (he already had several, but it made him smile anyway), and the Tonkses sent him a pair of constantly-warm mittens and a cap. From Hagrid of all people, he got a hand-made wooden flute that sounded a little like an owl (Cybèle gave him odd looks whenever he blew it, which left Ron and Harry in stitches), and from his great-grandmother on his mother's side, he got twenty pounds and a Christmas card where she said that he should use it to buy himself something nice.

"Wow, is that Muggle money?" Ron asked, leaning over from his bed. "It's _paper_!"

"Yeah, but special kind, see," Harry said, handing him the note and laughing at Ron's fascinated expression as he turned it around to look at the face on it. "That's one of the old ones, I think, cause it has Shakespeare on it."

"Shakespeare? He a wizard?"

"No, no, William Shakespeare. Y'know, the Bard? He wrote all those famous plays like _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_."

"Oh, I know _Romeo and Juliet_. Mum thinks it's the greatest thing ever," Ron said, sticking his tongue out in disgust. "Oh, yeah, this has got to be that balcony scene she's on about every time that play's mentioned," he added, having turned the note over to the backside. "He sounds wizardy, though."

"Well, he lived in the middle ages, so maybe he was. I can ask Bushyworm, she'll know."

The second best present was a strange-looking chess box with a set of wizarding chess pieces that he let sit on his bed while he read the note.

"Oh, look at this, Ron! _Dear Harry, Happy Christmas and New Year's. Since I know how much you and Ron like playing chess, I've decided to ask you to test this for me._ Ron, you're supposed to have the other half in your presents," he said, looking up from the note and grinning widely as Ron tore through his pile in search of similarly-wrapped present that was a matching one to Harry's own. " _It's a prototype for a new version of wizarding chess, but as I'm not a chess player myself, I need some expert input. The chess pieces are instructable, so that you and Ron can come up with your own rules that they'll memorise if you want, for twice as much fun, and they are designed to respond to the players' magic so that you'll never have problems with their occasional pesky insubordination. The board can also be arranged in new shapes, and you can even have it be in a third dimension. The charms should last a good long while, but they're experimental so if they break, let me know immediately, and of course, write to me what you and Ron think should be changed or improved. Have a wonderful holiday, and I expect to hear all the new ways of playing chess you've come up with when next we see each other. Love, Lily Snape_!"

" _Awesome_!" Ron yelled out, having read his own note. "Man, that slimy git's got the _coolest_ mum _ever_!"

"I know, right? We've gotta try it out later."

"Oh, definitely."

The best present, however, was the one from Sirius and Remus – a lightly wrapped package that turned out to be a fluid, silvery grey fabric, almost like woven water under his fingertips. Harry's eyes filled with tears as Ron gasped.

"I've heard of those!"

"It was my dad's," Harry whispered, pulling the invisible fabric as close to his chest as he could; it was cool to the touch and silkily soft, and where it covered Harry's chest, arms and legs, they vanished from sight. "My dad's Invisibility Cloak."

He laughed through his tears as Ron clambered onto the bed and gave him a tight side-hug, and Harry couldn't even find it within himself to feel embarrassed for crying like a little baby.

"There's a package, too," Ron said, reaching for it where the wrapping had fallen when Harry had pulled out the Invisibility Cloak. "I'll read the note for you, yeah?" Harry nodded in agreement, burying his nose in the fabric and trying to imagine his dad's smell still clinging to it. " _Dear Prongslet, Merry Christmas from Padfoot and Moony, and most of all, if indirectly, from Prongs himself. This belonged to your dad, and he left it in our possession when he died with the understanding that it should be given to you after you turned eleven and started Hogwarts. It was passed down from father to son in the Potter family all the way back to the Peverells, and your dad had always spoken with great excitement about handing it down to his son one day. We're very sorry that we can't be with you for the first Christmas of your Hogwarts career, and hope that this will at least let you know that we're thinking of you. A good friend had kept it safe for you all these years and promised to deliver it to you along with this package, which is something your mother held a great interest in, and that we made in honour of her, so that you may have both of them with you on what should be one of the happiest days of the year. Never forget that you were, and are, loved Harry, from the moment you came into the world until the day you leave it many years in the future._ "

Wiping his cheeks, Harry tugged the package out of Ron's hands and almost tore it apart in his haste to pull out the other half of the present. It was a large, very thick burgundy notebook, with his name written in careful golden calligraphy on the front. On the inside of the front bindings, he found a picture of him and his parents – his mum was holding him against her chest, turned towards the camera, and was waving at it with his tiny hand, while his dad stood behind them with his arms wrapped around his mum and was grinning proudly down at the both of them. Mesmerised, Harry traced their faces with his finger, because pictures of them had been scarce in his home and this was definitely one he'd never seen before.

"This must have been right before," Ron said softly. "It looks like it's winter, and you're pretty big."

"Yeah. It's eleven years today," Harry told him, flipping the first page and finding that it was, in fact, a scrapbook filled with random bits of paper, photographs and other memorabilia of his parents' time at Hogwarts and after. There were images of them at various ages, with people Harry knew and some that he didn't. Sirius and Remus were often there, and so were Lily Snape, Harry's godmother Bettina, an older girl that looked a little like Neville, and two or three others Harry had never even heard of. He glimpsed many of his professors – he even found Quirrell at the very edge of one! – and some people that Sirius worked with. A few had traces of someone being removed from them, and some looked really damaged, like they'd been through a lot. There were stories of his parents' misadventures, written in different handwritings, and to his surprise, these were far more realistic than any he'd ever heard before, to the point that they made his dad sound a little spoiled and his mum a little stuck-up. Harry didn't mind, though, because these were obviously not all written by Sirius and Remus, and the stories were fascinating enough in their own right he could overcome his instinctive need to defend his dead parents.

And on the back bindings, he found another photograph stuck on, a big one. It had been taken in a hospital, and it showed two beds. Harry's mum was on the left one, holding a red-faced, black-haired bundle in her arms and leaning against Harry's dad, who sat on the bed next to her. On the right one was the same blonde, round-faced woman that had to be Neville's mum, also holding a baby (though hers was bald), with the man that was most likely her husband sitting next to her in a mirror pose of Harry's parents. Between them, in a rocking chair, sat Lily Snape, properly dressed unlike her friends, hugging a black-haired baby obviously some weeks older than the two new-borns. Around them were all of their friends – Sirius was trying to give James finger-ears, and a pudgy, short-statured man was trying to swat it away from the other side of the bed; Remus was smiling down at Lily and offering his finger to her baby, who seemed fascinated by it; behind him were two identical, red-haired men who were making silly faces at the baby, and another sharp-faced witch on the other side of the chair that was glaring at them; the people around the Longbottoms were obviously older than the lot on the left side of the photograph, a stern-looking man in severe robes and a baby-faced one with wispy hair, a witch with a kind smile, and two others who looked like sisters, having distinctly gypsy features. They all looked at the camera at one point of the loop or another, and they all seemed more than happy to be there.

"That's a lot of people," Ron said, looking over Harry's shoulder. "Look, that's my uncles Fabian and Gideon again!"

"I think these are all the people Mum and Dad fought with during the War," Harry said, reading the inscription below. "See, they're all named. Mum and Dad and me, and these two are Neville's parents and Neville, cause you know we were born only a day apart, so that must mean that this is Alice Longbottom. Mrs Snape with the Slimy Git–"

"He had that nose even when he was a baby."

"–Only it says here her name is Lily Evans, so she probably wasn't married yet at the time. And Remus and Sirius. Your uncles, so the witch with them must be Emmeline Vance, and the tall guy on the other side is probably Edgar Bones, because I saw his sister Amelia Bones once, and they look alike. So, the other guy is Benjamin Fenwick, Sirius said he was also an Auror, and the two sisters would probably be Roma and Geneva Lovel, so that'd make the other one Marlene McKinnon."

"And the little guy on the side?"

Harry frowned, staring at him, but there was no name to go with him, and in the end there was only one possibility that came to mind.

"I think... I think that's Peter Pettigrew."

"The guy who betrayed your parents to You-Know-Who?"

"Yeah. I've never seen a picture of him, but he looks wormy, doesn't he, and his nickname was 'Wormtail' when they were at school. Wonder why they didn't remove him from the picture," he said thoughtfully, studying the face of the man that was responsible for his parents dying eleven years ago today. He was glad to know what the bastard looked like, though a part of him wished that Sirius had removed him from this photograph, too, the way he'd removed him from all those others.

"Do you know what happened to all these people?"

"Most of them died, I think. I never really knew, y'know? Sirius and Remus don't talk about the war much, but Sirius and Dad were Aurors, so they had to have known a lot of other people who fought, too."

"But it's nice to know that your parents had a lot of friends, and that they all knew you."

"Yeah," Harry agreed, closing the scrapbook and setting the Invisibility Cloak on top of it. "Yeah, you're right; it's sad that they are all dead, but at least Mum and Dad aren't alone."

It was a comforting thought that made him smile a little as he put his presents away, and so when Fred and George burst into the dormitory, Harry was in a good mood and ready to laugh at them also wearing the Weasley jumpers – theirs were also blue, though a darker shade than Harry's, and had yellow letters F and G on them.

"Merry Christmas!" they greeted in chorus. "Hey, look, you've already got your Weasley jumpers on!"

"Mine's _maroon_ again," Ron said with disgust. "She knows I hate maroon! Why does she _always_ make them _maroon_?!"

"At least you haven't got a letter on yours," George pointed out. "Suppose she thinks you don't forget your name, which is more than she thinks for us."

"The joke's on her, though; we're not stupid – we know we're called Gred and Forge."

"What's all this noise?" Percy's voice rang out from the hallway, and in the next moment he stuck his head in, looking somewhat disapproving. Fred tugged his lumpy jumper from where it was hanging over his arm and spread it out.

"P for prefect! Get it on, Percy, come on, we're all wearing ours, even Harry!"

"I – don't – want –" Percy complained as the twins manhandled the jumper over his head, knocking his glasses askew in the process.

"And you're not sitting with the Prefects today, either," George told him sternly. "Christmas is a time for family."

"Oh, yeah! Harry's got pictures of Uncle Fabian and Uncle Gideon!" Ron exclaimed, immediately making all three of his elder brothers pay attention to him. Expecting Ron's bullying, Harry reached for the scrapbook and opened to the pages where he remembered seeing images of the Prewett twins with Sirius and his dad, and so they ended up going to breakfast trading stories about the long-gone members of their families that they'd heard over the years, laughing all the while.

* * *

"Hey, Ron, what was it that you wanted to show me?" Harry asked his friend after they'd both settled into bed, having thoroughly exhausted themselves by playing in the snow with the few kids who'd stayed over the holidays and then stuffing themselves silly for Christmas Dinner.

"What– oh, yeah!" Ron exclaimed, waking up a little at the question. "I can show you tomorrow, if you want, first thing."

"I was thinking now, actually," Harry said, pulling on thick woollen socks he'd gotten from Dumbledore for Christmas.

"Now? It's almost midnight, and I'm tired, Harry."

"Oh, come on! We can give the Invisibility Cloak a test ride, see how it works?"

That won Ron right over, and the two eleven-year-olds ended up sticking very close to one another under the Invisibility Cloak as they snuck out of the tower. Ron led them to the sixth floor in the general direction of the Ravenclaw Tower, and pulled Harry into a disused classroom of some sort after about fifteen minutes of walking. Harry didn't need much time to find what Ron had meant for him to see – a magnificent mirror, extending from floor to ceiling and standing on clawed feet, with an ornate golden frame. More than intrigued, Harry approached the mirror, his gaze catching on the inscription carved at the top of the mirror.

 _Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi_

When he looked towards his own reflection, the sight made him almost release a shocked scream, and he instinctively took a step back.

"What did you see?" Ron asked, grabbing his arm and stopping him from stepping back towards the mirror.

"My... my mum," Harry whispered, aching to go back and properly inspect the reflection. "You?"

"Myself," Ron told him. "I'm older, a Head Boy, and the Quidditch captain. I'm holding the Quidditch Cup, and my parents are proud of me. Come on, maybe you can see me if we stand together!"

But the mirror was not wide enough for the both of them to be properly visible, and it didn't seem to really work with only half of them reflected, so Ron stepped aside to let Harry see his own image properly.

There he stood, a little pale and with his hair in its usual disarray, in pyjamas and with socks on his feet, and standing directly behind him, leaning over so that her arms were draped around Harry's shoulders, was Mary Potter, her dark hair braided prettily over her shoulder and with a smile reflected in her blue eyes, the same eyes that Harry had. She was a little on the short side, and darker skinned than he'd thought, or maybe that was just from the lack of light in the room. She looked so very real that for a moment, he almost thought he could feel the weight of her arms on his shoulders.

Harry stepped closer, studying her face hungrily, counting her eyelashes, inspecting the darker specks in her blue eyes. Touching the mirror, he ran his fingers shakily over her eyebrow ridges and her hands, the strong knuckles of her fingers and the flat length of her fingernails, and the ache inside his chest, half joy and half terrible sadness, made tears spill over his eyes.

 _Mummy_ , he thought, or maybe whispered, and she smiled at him through her own tears.

"Harry, are you all right?" Ron's voice broke through the trance, and Harry stepped away from the mirror, wiping his tears with embarrassment; Ron had seen him cry far too much today already.

"Yeah, I... my mum, she's right there."

"What do you think the mirror shows? The future?"

Harry shook his head. "No, Mum's gone."

"Let me look," Ron asked, tugging on Harry's arm.

"You've had it all to yourself for days; give me a bit more time."

"You can look at it whenever you want, you've got the Cloak; my brothers always notice when I'm gone, I can't sneak out like you can. I wanna see how I look with the Quidditch Cup!"

"It's just a Quidditch Cup, Ron," Harry shot back, trying to shove Ron away. "This is my mum!"

"Don't push me–"

The sudden noise from the corridor made them both startle out of their argument, and Ron had the presence of mind to toss the Invisibility Cloak over them right as Filch's Mrs Norris slunk into the room. Harry and Ron held their breath and kept as still as possible, and it seemed an age until the cat finally grew bored with the inspection and vanished out the door again.

"I bet she's gone to get Filch," Ron whispered, tugging on Harry's sleeve firmly enough to dislodge him in the direction of the door. "Besides, I'm freezing and it's the middle of the night; we can come back another time."

So they pattered back to the dorm room and settled into their beds, but whereas Ron fell asleep within minutes, Harry remained awake, imagining his mum's face behind his closed eyelids and yearning to go back and see it, just for a little longer.

He couldn't sneak away for most of the following day, and in the excitement of making an enormous igloo with the help of one or two freezing spells that Percy taught them, he let the mirror almost slip his mind. In the sunshine, even on such a freezing day, it was far more pleasant to engage his mind in other pursuits, like playing chase with Cybèle and Fang, Hagrid's enormous boarhound, or feeding with Hagrid the invisible Thestrals that pulled the Hogwarts carriages.

But when night came, all his thoughts turned again back to the mirror, and so he waited only long enough to make certain that Ron had fallen asleep before sneaking out and retracing their steps to the disused classroom; this time, he had the presence of mind to put on his winter cloak, and so he could spread it under him and sit down in front of the mirror without getting a cold bum for his troubles.

His mother sat down with him so that he was in the V of her legs, his ankles resting against hers, her arms wrapped around him under his armpits, and if he let his mind drift just a little, he could imagine that she was _actually_ behind him, hugging him and smiling at their reflection over his shoulder.

She was beautiful, and now that Harry had time to compare them in peace, he could find all the parts of his face that he'd gotten from her – his eyes, of course, large and light blue, but with dark blue specks like someone had flung some paint droplets on a canvass, and also his mouth, with the slightly fuller upper lip and just a little bit narrow at the ends. He thought that their smile was the same, with their teeth peeking through just a little bit even if they weren't laughing outright.

He lost track of time for most of the night, and only snuck back when the room gradually began lightening as the dawn broke. He slept badly and far shorter than he'd wanted, what with Ron waking him up for breakfast, which left him listless for the rest of the day.

"Did you go see the mirror last night?" his best friend asked him when Harry didn't even feel up to testing their weird chess set.

"Yeah, so?"

"Don't go back tonight, Harry."

"Why not?"

"I dunno, I just have a bad feeling about it. Besides, you promised we'd figure out how the chess set works, and you're nodding off already, when it's not even eight!"

"I'm awake," Harry said, though probably unconvincingly.

"No," Ron said, stomping his foot and pulling Harry up to their dormitory. "You're not going tonight."

"Leave me alone!"

"How about this," Ron suggested, switching tracks. "You sleep tonight and tomorrow we play with the chess set, and then tomorrow night you'll be more rested to go. You'll probably end up with a cold if you fall asleep in that classroom, and then you'll be in bed and won't be able to go for who knows how long."

Harry had to agree to that; he'd felt distinctly cold for most of the day, a residual chill from spending a winter night in an unheated stone room. So, with some difficulty, he honoured Ron's suggestion and actually got some sleep; in the morning, his nose was a little runny and his throat scratchy, but he ignored them and spent most of the day in front of the fire, inventing ever wilder rules for chess and laughing hilariously with Ron at all the comments and random suggestions their chess pieces had on the topic.

But when the night came, he bundled himself up as warmly as he could (with his cap and mittens, and in trousers and a shirt this time, rather than his pyjamas) and, hidden under the Invisibility Cloak, he spent another night sitting with his mum in front of the mirror, so tired by the end that he could barely find his way back, but mostly just aching from the fact that he had to leave her.

The next day, he could no longer ignore the fact that Ron had been right and he'd gotten a cold. Percy took charge as soon as he saw Harry at breakfast and marched him to Madam Pomfrey, who fed him some disgusting potion that made steam come out of his ears for _ever_ and gave him common cough drops to soothe his throat, all the while scolding him for walking around without proper winter attire in such a windy, freezing place as a millennium-old castle.

Harry didn't let that stop him, though, from going back to the mirror and his mum. He felt miles better by dinnertime, and it was only some sneezing and coughing; he'd had loads worse when he was younger, he knew what it felt like to be sick, and this wasn't it.

The mirror was where he'd left it last night, and his feet carried him the last few steps without much conscious choice on his part, because his mind was far too preoccupied with seeing his mum again.

"So, back again, Harry?"

Harry almost jumped in fright. When he turned, slowly, slowly, he found Albus Dumbledore sitting on one of the desks by the wall, and the realisation that he'd walked right past the old wizard without even noticing him made Harry's stomach plummet.

Sniffing, he tried to appear a little more casual than he had a moment before.

"I... I didn't' see you there, sir."

"Strange, how short sighted being invisible can make you," Dumbledore commented, and Harry blinked in surprise – he was still under the Invisibility Cloak. So how had...

Pulling it down to reveal himself, Harry stepped towards the old Headmaster.

"How did you know I was here, then?"

Patting the desk with his hand to invite Harry to sit with him, Dumbledore smiled.

"Did you know that Muggles can accomplish the most amazing feats that look like magic, without having ever known that true magic actually exists? They call themselves magicians. I remember going to see one such act as a young man, by a namesake of yours, incidentally – a Muggle named Harry Houdini; it was extraordinary, the places he could escape from. And they have a saying, I'm told: 'a magician never reveals his secrets'. But, between you and me, Harry," Dumbledore said, leaning forward and conspiratorially lowering his voice, "more's the pity that the Invisibility Cloak cannot make you inaudible, as well as invisible."

In spite of his initial nervousness, Harry smiled.

"So," Dumbledore continued, leaning back a little, "you, like hundreds before you, have discovered the delights of the Mirror of Erised."

"I didn't know it was called that."

"But I expect you've realised by now what it does?"

"It showed me my mum, but..." Harry said thoughtfully, casting a longing glance at the mirror.

"But it showed your friend Ron himself as Head Boy."

Harry blinked through the darkness at the old wizard and thought for a moment what it might mean.

"So... it shows us what we want? How did you know what it showed for Ron? I couldn't see it."

"I don't need a cloak to become invisible, my boy." And Ron had told Harry that first night what he'd seen; had the old Headmaster been here every time Harry had come? Did that mean he'd known that Ron had found the mirror even before he'd shown it to Harry? "Let me explain it a little better. The Mirror of Erised shows us nothing more and nothing less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who've never had a mother, see her standing with you. Ronald Weasley, who has struggled with being overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself the pride and joy of his parents. To the happiest man on earth, it will show him exactly as he is. However, the Mirror does not share either knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible."

"That's..."Harry trailed off to cough and give the mirror a mistrustful look. "Scary," he concluded in the end, accepting a large handkerchief from Dumbledore to blow his nose into it.

"The Mirror will be moved to a new home tomorrow, Harry; you understand why you shouldn't look for it again now, yes?"

"Yes, sir," he confirmed, though his heart ached and he wanted to ask the old man for one last look, just to be sure that he'd memorised his mum properly. But he was smarter than that, and knew he was better off just letting it go.

"You have your godfather, Harry," Dumbledore reminded him gently. "And there are so many who did not have anyone at all, growing up. Do not allow that to lose its significance to you."

"You're right," he decided with a nod. "I won't look for it again, I promise."

"Good. And if you ever _do_ run across it, you will now be prepared. Now, then, I think you've missed the next dose of the cold medicine Madam Pomfrey had prescribed for you this morning," he said, making Harry's cheeks heat up in embarrassment as he accepted the potion from the old Headmaster and drank it in one gulp, making a face at the taste of it and the momentary deafness from the steam coming out of his ears.

"Why are all the potions always so disgusting?"

"Alas, I would have liked to have known that, as well. That is a question better posed to a potions master, rather than a transfigurations expert, I fear."

Yawning widely behind his hand, Harry snuggled into Dumbledore's side, the way he'd sometimes done when he'd been very young and the old wizard had just been Gampa Bumbabee (which Harry refused to _ever_ say again, on account of Dumbledore's sheer joyful amusement at the nickname and Harry's own _utter_ embarrassment). "So, what do you see when you look in the Mirror?"

Dumbledore stayed quiet for so long that Harry almost nodded off before getting his answer, but he _did_ give one to Harry in the end, and one that was probably more truthful than he would have given anyone else.

"I see much the same thing you do, my boy; I see things that cannot be."

* * *

Occlumency training wasn't something that held a defined structure, Evan's father had told him when they'd first started developing his mental shields. It depended largely on the relationship between the student and the master, and was highly individualised exactly because of it.

Evan's father never talked much about his own study of mind magics, so Evan knew only the information he'd accumulated over the years on the subject. Severus had been taught by Albus Dumbledore himself, though it was a point of pride for the dark man that he held a natural affinity towards Occlumency that was nearly unrivalled in Wizarding Britain, at least as far as Dumbledore had told him. While Evan didn't have any sort of latent Occluding ability, he _had_ taken after his dad in that it didn't come with any difficulty to him, the way it had to his mother, who'd spent the last fifteen years practicing it and still had to have regular sessions with his dad to improve.

And, in order to help him properly deal with his homesickness, Evan's dad had told him that day when they'd all three had the big conversation, Evan needed to learn to acknowledge and accept his emotions without letting them overwhelm him.

"This is the part that has always come far more easily to me than to your father," his mother had told him that day. "Because in many ways, it's completely opposite to what had always come so naturally to him. He can order his mind and deal with them without understanding them, but when one isn't able to do that, the only other way is to study them and learn to recognise them as they come to you, so that you know how to handle them and not let them accumulate until they affect you as badly as they had."

They'd talked his tough moments, his fears and anxieties, through his disquiet and unhappiness for the last semester, and both she and Evan's dad had tried to find some small way of making those things more bearable.

"It'll get easier, hon, I promise you," his mum had told him, "but until then, these coping mechanisms will help you."

Lily's suggestion was that he write to her in detail about feeling a certain way, and his thoughts on why he'd come to feel that, after which he was to make himself do something fun and engaging for at least half an hour.

"The problem with unhappy emotions is that they only make you see the bad things. If you do something fun – read a mystery book, or brew a new potion, or have a discussion with Hermione – then the good things will make everything look a little better. And I don't mean studying by it," she'd added with a pointed look. "You and I both know that you're not like your friend, and that you like learning only when it pertains to something you like."

However, that had still left the problem of long separation from them and not knowing how to handle it. For this, his father had had a solution.

"I've spoken with Albus; he's agreed to let me come once a week so that you and I can have Occlumency sessions. You've reached the point where a more intensive training regimen would be highly beneficial, and it will give you a chance to acclimatise yourself to the idea of being away from home for so long without stressing you to the point where your cauldron explodes in your face."

The conversation, and the fact that his night terrors had stopped practically from the moment he'd come home, had left Evan feeling far more confident in the next semester than he had been a month ago. This had resulted in more self-confidence, which found its outlet in daring to try little tricks he'd read in the Legilimency book on his dad during their Occlumency sessions.

Which, in hindsight, ended up being a completely terrible idea.

The lesson started quite normally, with Evan emptying his mind and summoning his shields to the forefront – emptying his mind was tricky business, but Evan had learned it as a little kid, when his father had taught him to recognise what it even meant for one's mind to be emptied by putting him to sleep with relaxation techniques, and had since developed a quick trick to it: in order to empty his conscious mind of emotions and memories, he focused on a single thing, in his case potion recipes for the potions that he held no true associations to, most often those he'd learned in the last few years by rote. It was crude, in his father's opinion, but effective enough for an eleven-year-old that he didn't object. Occlumency was a lifelong study, and like all other magics, it evolved with the witch or wizard preforming it.

His father attacked him, probing his first shields and his primary shields beyond them, searching for weaknesses that Evan would need to work on. Normally, once they were finished with that portion of the session, they'd move on to the way Evan partitioned his mind, ordered his memories and generally handled all of the things that came with it, such as emotions and association pathways.

This time, however, when his father attacked him, Evan chose to attempt offence as defence, and used his primary shields as weapons instead as soon as his father managed to get through his first shields, trying to drive his father out with one strong hit.

The tug was too sudden for him to properly brace himself, and he almost face-planted into the couch cushions, while through the sudden influx of memories that weren't his own, he saw Severus stagger back on his heels and into the sofa chair behind him.

The memories, though – or, more precisely, the one memory – captured his full attention, because in it, he was standing– no, hanging– no, standing, but the owner of the memory was hanging upside down on a grassy field, and there were people, and a red-haired girl was screaming at a black-haired, bespectacled boy until he released the hanging memory owner, saying: 'you're lucky Evans was here, Snivellus, your knight in shining arm–', and the memory owner was shouting back: 'I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!', and the red-haired girl blinked with betrayal in her eyes and a tear down her cheek, saying : 'Fine, that's the last time I bother. You're on your own from now on, _Snivellus_ ,' in a cold, furious voice, before cursing the bespectacled boy and sprinting away while the memory owner–

"Ugh," Evan groaned, clenching his eyes tightly shut, his head spinning as he was forcibly shoved back into his own head, horror and anger and disgust rising to the surface as those hateful words rang in his head over and over again.

"What were you trying to do?" his father was asking, but he couldn't focus on that, couldn't focus on anything except–

"You called Mum 'Mudblood'," he whispered, throat clogging with horrified tears. "You called Mum 'Mudblood'. How could you?"

His father exhaled sharply, pinching the bridge of his nose, and only repeated his questions. It only made Evan jump to this feet, fists clenched at his sides, and scream out his own question again.

"Evan, you will control yourself _this instant_ ," Severus said through clenched teeth.

"I thought you were different than all of those bloodists! I thought you were better than them! I thought–"

Because the person Evan loved most in his life was the person his father had hurt so badly, because Evan's best friend was a Muggle-born who'd been hurt by that very word for simply being what she was and daring to be friends with Slytherins, because realising that his father could be so cruel to someone he loved was vomit-inducing, Evan ran out of the room and to his attic, almost crashing into his mum and clipping her with his shoulder instead, choosing to ignore her worried face on his way up, ending up with his face buried in his pillow, tears staining the sheets.

Of course, when the first wave of emotion passed, Evan was left with utter embarrassment at what he'd done and how he'd reacted – he hated it, _hated it_ , not just the memory, the whole bloody business, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't such a big deal, not really. They'd been kids, and it obviously hadn't done any real harm to their relationship, when they'd ended up married and having him. Beyond that, his mum and dad disagreed from time to time, argued loudly and then gave each other the silent treatment, just like any other pair of people in any sort of relationship. Evan himself had used insulting words against Hermione when she annoyed him, and she gave as good as she got. So why in the world had _this_ word, said to and by _this_ pair of people, left him so very upset?

"Have you calmed yourself?" his father asked from the door, staring at him in what Evan was shocked to note as calm amusement.

"I... I apologise. That was... I don't... really know what that was."

"That, Evan, was one of the various accidental occurrences that occasionally happen when training Occlumency, though not one common enough that I could have predicted it. Emotional spill-over from the memories is not something I had ever had to deal with personally; it took me a few moments to realise what had happened myself. You have nothing to be ashamed of, Son."

Moving away from the door, his father sat down on the bed next to him and pulled Evan into his side.

"I don't remove memories from my mind when we train, because in spite of the many, many small and large secrets that I hold from you – because you are young or because I feel that they will hurt you if you know them or because it is none of your business – I trust you implicitly, and so I take the risk of you stumbling onto them quite consciously. I had hoped that you would never stumble into that particular memory, but obviously, like many other things in my life, it was not a feasible hope."

"Then... will you tell me what happened?"

"If you want, I'll show you."

Swallowing with difficulty, Evan nodded.

"Get your wand out; I'm going to teach you to Legilimise me."

And so began his first official lesson in Legilimency. Most mind magics went in pairs, and Legilimency was the partner of Occlumency, so the principles weren't different, so much as inverted, like a glove tugged inside-out. But, Evan had read several chapters of his Legilimency book, and had been practicing some of the simple exercises recommended in it, so he at least had the basics down.

There was no wand movement, and _Legilimens_ incantation only held the purpose of focusing one's magic and amplifying it through the wand; the true casting behind it was, as all mind magics, produced and completed before the wizard's magic ever left their beings. Legilimency required a precise focus that needed to hold at least a part of the wizard's consciousness. With beginners like Evan, however, who often found it too difficult to split their focus effectively, a more successful approach was projecting all of their consciousness through the magical connection, even if that left them extremely vulnerable.

In the end, it wasn't as difficult as Evan had imagined it would be. He'd been refining focusing his thoughts to be picked up by a Legilimens for years, and this wasn't too different from that. The hard part was the fact that one's consciousness wasn't composed merely of thoughts, but also senses, learned and inborn abilities, and peripheral awareness of reality. Once his father managed to explain to him how to bind together his consciousness into something he could put defined borders on, all he really had to do was hurl it at his father's mind, and for that, the _Legilimens_ spell was invaluable.

The memory he'd stumbled onto was at the very front of his father's mind, there for him to simply walk in and observe... though a more precise description would have been to live it with his father, because he now recognised emotions associated with the memory that weren't his own, and while he was aware he wasn't looking through his eyes, the memory was from his father's perspective, rather than a third-person one as he'd heard was normal for extracted memories. It began with his father gathering his things and walking over the grassy incline towards Hogwarts as a sixteen-year-old. The knowledge that went with the memory, like his father's age, was simply there, even though he'd not learned it consciously in any manner. His father's – and Evan's – reaction was swift when James Potter called out to him, an ingrained response that had to have been the consequence of years of conditioning. They were too slow, however, and ended up losing their wand to a swiftly cast _Expelliarmus_ , after which they were knocked off their feet. There was some very unpleasant ribbing, jeering comments meant to provoke, and their anger and desperation rose in tandem with them and the laughter of the people around them. They swore at the Gryffindor foursome and got a mouthful of _Scourgify_ for their trouble which made them gag and choke to the point that Evan thought they'd suffocate.

Then Lily Evans was there, screaming at Potter with a voice Evan knew to be afraid of, like a fury come to Earth, and Potter was trying to _flirt_ with her, the bastard, as if they weren't fighting for every breath. A cancelling spell hit them, courtesy of the redhead, so that at least they could breathe, but as they spat out bubbles and the disgusting tang of soap from their mouth, the laughter became even louder, and it got more and more difficult to ignore it, to keep the anger on simmer, to not lose control. They inched towards their wand as Potter grabbed Lily's arm and kept her in place so that she couldn't come to them, and Black was too slow to notice, giving them a chance to cast a half-finished Cutting Curse that tasted of Dark at Potter, cutting his cheek only slightly, still not working like they'd wanted it to, and then the world tilted in dizzying speed that almost made them gag, as _their own spell_ was used against them to hang them upside-down in the air, their robes falling down and half-obscuring their vision, and Evan remembered in his own horror that when his parents were young, robes were still full outfits rather than simple overgarments, the trend of trousers and shirts only coming into style in mid-eighties, as uproarious laughter spread all over the crowd at their old underpants and legs, and Evan saw through his inverted vision that his mum's eyes were wide with horror and glassy with tears, but he also sensed that his father's mind hadn't registered that, had zeroed instead on the twitch of her body which was far more obvious, and that he'd interpreted it wrong, that he'd thought she'd almost _laughed_ , not cried, and then the fury was rising like a slow but inexorable tide, stomping out their calm, warping all that was left of their common sense.

Lily's shout got them down so that they could try and get back to their feet and defend themselves, but they were too slow and it was three against one, and through the Body-Binding Curse they could see Lily turning her drawn wand on Potter and threatening to hex him if he didn't release them _right now_ , and then Potter was there with his ugly mug and his sneering smile, saying: 'There you go. You're lucky Evans was there, Snivellus, your knight in shining arm–', and they were yelling back in such blind rage as Evan had never in his life experienced: 'I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her,' and there was association between Lily and Muggle-born and Muggle-born and Mudblood, but absolutely no connection between Lily being the one to defend them like some emasculated, incompetent _damsel in distress_ and the exclaimed epithet, no realisation that it was Lily they were calling Mudblood, just that a Muggle-born had made everything worse and that was what they'd been calling Muggle-borns who weren't Lily, because all the Slytherins did it and they'd wanted to be accepted, wanted to be part of something bigger, were still in that mind-set because that was what Dumbledore needed of them, needed them to be spies and they had to stay immersed in that world and 'Mudblood' was part of that world.

And then clarity, through the single tear slipping down Lily's cheek, so small it was almost invisible, and the cold crispness of her voice as she said: 'Fine, that's the last time I bother. You're on your own from now on, _Snivellus,_ ' before she turned to Potter and cast the Slug-Vomiting Hex at him and the Bat-Bogey Hex at Black, leaving them on their knees trying to deal with those as Lupin and Pettigrew jumped in to help and at least giving Evan's father the chance to try and chase after Lily, driven by the realisation of what he'd said and the devastating certainty that in spite of everything, this had been the moment of choice and he'd failed it, that he'd lost Lily forever, to his own anger and blindness.

And then Evan was back in his own head, pressing his fists to his forehead against the pounding and panting through the sudden disappearance of the emotions that he only now realised weren't his own at all, but his father's, their lingering taste making tears spring to his eyes yet again.

His father's hand was ice-cold as it was laid on Evan's forehead, but it was more than welcome.

"Breathe, my little light, deep breaths. That's it, in and out."

When he finally managed to calm down, Evan crawled fully onto his bed and curled up, resting his cheek on the duvet and avoiding his dad's eyes. The memory was still far too fresh, the depth and breadth of emotions, the cruelty of mere children, the helplessness of it all.

"Is... is it supposed to be like this?"

"It's different for everyone," Severus said, carding his fingers through Evan's hair, "and I didn't think it would be like this, no, though given the even downstairs, perhaps I should have. There is normally a distance between the memory and the Legilimens."

"So why? It..." unbidden, a whimper escaped him, and his father gently ran his finger over Evan's brow.

"Perhaps simply because it was your first time; we'll be careful next time."

"And if not? If I can't..."

"You can," his father insisted. "It was only your first attempt, Son. This is a lifelong pursuit, so it is foolish to get discouraged from the very start, and even if it is always like this, you will learn to handle it, just like you have done every other skill you have set your mind to."

Deciding his dad was right, Evan dragged himself into sitting position and curled up with his feet on the bed, his arms around his legs and his chin on his knees, so that his hair fell around his face and hid him from view.

"You always told me about Potter's father and guardian, but I never realised..."

"The cruelty of children, Evan, should never be underestimated." Severus sighed and scooted up on the bed to sit next to Evan, placing his arm around Evan's shoulders and pulling him into his side for the second time in ten munutes. "That is the second worst event of my life," he began softly. "It is the moment your mother and I were furthest apart in our lives. It was dumb luck that got us through it, dumb luck and Albus, and I dread to even think about what our lives would be like today if it weren't for them."

Remembering all the times he'd let his temper lead him in the past four months, Evan almost shuddered. Both of his parents had a temper, and he'd inherited it along with their stubbornness and pride. But he never wanted to find himself in a situation like that, not ever, and that was what might happen if he didn't learn to control himself.

"We were only sixteen, Evan, and it was a difficult time for the both of us. But we got through it, and it is not something you should worry about. Just remember that you must never let yourself be blinded by anger; impulsive decisions are those that you'll regret the most."

"Yeah," he agreed, closing his eyes and leaning against his dad. "I hate that word."

"I do, as well."

"Love you, Dad."

"And I you, Son. Now, come on; your mother was rather worried when you nearly knocked her down, so let us go downstairs and assure her that everything is all right."

Smiling up at his dad, Evan nodded his head, putting the new revelations out of his mind and instead turning to what was for supper, because all this upheaval was rather draining, and he really was completely starving. There was only a little bit of winter hols left, and he was going to use the time to the fullest.

* * *

 **A/N:** _Beauty and the Beast_ came out in November 1991, so Harry and Sirius are just about in time to see it in the cinema. Harry Houdini, whom I'm sure everyone knows of as one of the greatest escape artists to have ever performed, lived from 1874 to 1926, which makes him a rough contemporary of Albus Dumbledore, who was born in 1881. He also had a tour around Europe from 1900 to 1904, allowing for a young adult Dumbledore to have gone and seen him, which I think would have been exactly something that would have peaked the old coot's interest. I liked the idea of Houdini being a Muggle, given how easily wizards and witches proficient in wandless magic could have done all the things he'd done, as well.


	18. Ch 17: The Meaning of Names

**Chapter 17: The Meaning of Names**

On the 31st of December, just as the few students remaining at Hogwarts for the winter holidays were finishing dinner, Harry saw Remus slip into the Great Hall. Exclaiming hoarsely in happiness, he shot out of his seat and nearly tackled the man in a hug, suppressing his cough all the while.

"Remus, you made it!"

"I did. Albus neglected to mention you were ill," he noted with a frown.

"I'm fine," Harry assured him, the sneeze contradicting his words.

"Yes, I'm sure."

"No, really. I stayed in bed the last two days, and my fever's gone. Madam Pomfrey said it's passing, even."

"Well, if you say so," Remus said, though he placed the back of his palm against Harry's forehead to check his temperature. Harry rolled his eyes but indulged his pseudo-uncle's worrywart tendencies, and Remus rewarded him for it with a small smile and by joining him at the students' table for the remainder of dinner, where he listened indulgently to their chatter.

When they were done, he walked up with Harry to the Gryffindor Common Room and sat with him by the fire; the Weasleys, respecting the fact that Harry had a guest, found themselves suddenly busy with other things, giving Harry and Remus their privacy.

"Is Sirius back?" was Harry's first question.

"Not yet," Remus answered with a shake of his head. "But he should be by the end of the week."

"And he's ok?"

"Yes, he's all right. So, I hear you put your dad's Cloak to good use already?"

"Oh. Dumbledore told you about that, huh?"

"I also found the Mirror once," Remus confided. "When I was sixteen."

"You did?" Harry asked, eyebrows rising in surprise.

"Yes, I did; right before the end of my fifth year."

"What did you see?"

The werewolf offered him a wry smile. "What do you think?"

"Yourself, but not Cursed."

Remus nodded. "Like you, I saw something that would never happen."

"Remus, why did I only see my mum? Why didn't I see Dad, too?"

As if knowing that was the exact question he was to answer, Remus wrapped Harry up in a blanket and pulled him into his lap.

"Because even though you and Sirius pretend it's not like that, Sirius has been your da since you were just a baby. But you've never had a mum that way, and so you wish for her more than you wish for James." Leaning back, Remus studied him a moment. "Are you upset about it?"

"No. Dunno, maybe a little," Harry admitted. "I just... I always knew I wished that they were with me, but... I want Dad, too."

"It's perfectly all right that you only saw your mum, Harry. We can't help the things we wish for, and it doesn't mean that you don't wish your dad were alive, too. It just means you wish for your mum in more ways than your dad, and that's perfectly understandable."

"But, I don't think I'd like it if Sirius got married," Harry admitted, lowering his voice. "I like that it's just him and me. And you too," he added after a moment of thought.

"I think it would probably be best if you left that decision until Sirius finds himself a wife and you see if you like her or not. Maybe you'll feel differently then."

"...He's not going to get a wife, though, right?"

"Not that I know of," Remus answered with a small smirk, and Harry settled back against his chest, satisfied with the answer. After a moment, he sneezed and had to sniff to keep his nose from running until Remus offered him a handkerchief to blow it into.

"Ugh, I hate this stupid cold."

"Then you shouldn't have gone sneaking about under the Cloak without warm clothes," Remus chided him.

"I don't think I like that Mirror anymore," he decided with a nod.

"It's dangerous, especially for those who don't know what it is."

"Dumbledore said that the Mirror does not share either knowledge or truth."

Thoughtfully, Remus inclined his head. "I don't know that I agree. Certainly it showed you the truth of your greatest wish, and it _is_ good knowledge to have. It means you know what your weakness is, because people can manipulate you through it if they knew. So, now that you are aware of it, you'll be doubly prepared. It doesn't reveal anything that you couldn't have learned yourself, but it _does_ show you _a_ truth."

"Huh," Harry murmured, thinking it over. Remus' words made sense, actually, because while he knew that people couldn't come back from the dead, their world was governed by magic, and wizards often said that there was very little that magic couldn't do, so perhaps it was more a question of someone not figuring out a way of bringing back the dead, rather than it being impossible. If he looked at it that way, he could see how someone offering to bring his parents back might be tempting. "Hey, Remus, did you think to stay with me until midnight?"

"That was my plan, since I was forced to miss Christmas with you. I am sorry about that, Prongslet."

"It's ok," Harry assured him. "How is your da?"

"He's... well, he's my dad," Remus said after a moment of uncertain silence. Then he shook his head. "He's still not completely healthy, but I think my visit helped get him on his way, and that's the most important thing."

"Will you ever tell me why you and he don't get along?"

"One day when you're older, if you still want to know," Remus agreed easily. "It's just things in the past that we've not yet really learned to live with, that's all. He sends you Christmas salutations, and he would like it if you came to visit him with me in the summer."

Harry nodded immediately, remembering the weathered, slightly stooping wizard with a tired smile that always seemed so lonely whenever Harry saw him. He'd only met Lyall Lupin a few times in his life, most of those when the older wizard had visited London for business, and he didn't have much of an opinion one way or another on whether or not he wanted to spend time with the man, but Harry did have almost instinctive knowledge that his presence would make things easier for father and son, and for Remus, the boy knew he'd do practically anything asked of him – Sirius was Harry's primary caregiver, yes, but Remus was too almost as much, if in different ways, and Harry loved him in much the same way that he did his godfather.

"Thank you for the presents, Remus," he said, changing the subject. "I loved the scrapbook."

"You did?" Remus asked, smiling delightedly.

"Yeah, it was great to hear what other people thought of Mum and Dad, and to see all the photographs. Though, I don't think they all liked Mum and Dad as much as you and Sirius."

To Harry's surprise, Remus sighed quite deeply at that. "Harry, what Sirius and I have told you, it... I think you're old enough to understand that there are more sides to every story than just yours, yes? The same is true for all those stories about your parents. Sirius and I told you a lot of really good things about your dad, and they're true, but... they're not the only things that are true. The way other people saw them, that also holds truth."

"So... Mum and Dad weren't as great as you told me?" Harry asked, trying to figure out what Remus was saying.

"That is a way of seeing it, yes. Harry, your parents were good people, and great friends. But they weren't perfect, and I included those stories in the scrapbook because I want you to understand that. It's all right to think the best of your parents, but also to remember that they had their faults, just like you and Sirius and I do."

"I get it, I think. Moony?"

"Yeah, Prongslet?"

"I think I'd like to spend New Year's with them. With Mum and Dad."

Remus nodded and got Harry to his feet, tugging the blanket off the eleven-year-old and moving to fold it properly.

"You'll need to dress warmly, then. Cap, scarf, mittens, your warmest winter cloak. We'll go at half eleven, and until then, if you like, we can go through the scrapbook together and I'll tell you about all of our other friends."

"The ones who died in the War."

"Yes, the ones who died during the War."

Which was what they did. Harry got the Weasleys, too, and Remus regaled them all with stories about Fabian and Gideon Prewett and all the other people, too, and even some stories about James and Mary that he'd heard before, except this time, it was obvious that Remus had disagreed or didn't think best certain decisions that his parents had made and actions they'd taken. It was a little jarring, that was true enough, but Harry found himself fascinated with this new side of who his parents were, and so didn't find it too hard to accept because, after all, he'd grown up with Sirius Black, whom Harry had witnessed making plenty of mistakes in his life.

And when eleven-thirty drew close, Harry dressed in his warmest outerwear and trekked through the snow with Remus to Hogwarts' gates, from where they could Disapparate. They Apparated in Godric's Hollow and took a walk through the sleepy, Christmas-decorated village to the local cemetery.

The Potter grave was marked with a large marble headstone. Harry and Remus stopped in front of it, and Harry traced his fingers over the top of the headstone, reading the inscription on it:

 _James Potter, born 27 March 1960, died 25 December 1980_

 _Mary Potter, born 28 April 1960, died 25 December 1980_

 _The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death_

"There was a text on the Mirror that made no sense," Harry remembered. "Do you know what it said?"

"If I remember correctly, it said ' _I show not your face but your heart's desire_ '," Remus answered. "It's written backwards."

"Oh! I hadn't thought of that at all! 'Erised' is 'desire' spelled backwards! Of course!" Smiling to himself about it, Harry crouched down and leaned against the headstone. "Mum, I got to see you properly this Christmas," he murmured, feeling a little silly for talking to thin air but remembering that this was something Sirius had always done when they visited his parents' grave, and so deciding to give it a shot. "You were really pretty, Mum." Frowning, he studied the mostly undisturbed snow on the grave. "Hey, Remus, can you teach me that spell for conjuring flowers?"

"Of course. What kind of flowers do you want?"

"What was Mum's favourite?"

Remus took a moment to think the question over, and Harry waited him out patiently.

"I believe it was gladioli. Would you like to conjure those?"

"Yeah," Harry decided. "Is the spell different for different types of flowers?"

"There is a general spell that mostly conjures a random bouquet, but if you want a specific group of flowers, there are specialised conjuration spells. For gladioli, I believe the spell is _Ixieous_."

It took Harry some twenty minutes to get it right, the wand movement consisting of four elliptical turns arranged top to bottom and the proper pronunciation with its _xie_ sound, but he did manage it just before the church bell began ringing out the twelve-time mark for the beginning of 1992, and when the new year did arrive, there were two very pretty gladioli stalks on the grave, one pale pink and the other purplish-blue.

"Happy New Year," Harry whispered, feeling a peculiar sort of melancholy happiness.

"Happy New Year, Harry," Remus whispered, hugging him as they both looked in silence at the grave of James and Marry Potter.

* * *

"Evan!" Hermione exclaimed happily the moment she spotted her best friend on the King's Cross station. Evan waved back at her, and so she dragged her mum and dad over to Evan and his parents to finally introduce everyone properly. She'd gotten to meet her role model early in the winter hols, when she'd managed to convince her dad to let her spend the day in Diagon Alley with Evan; their fathers had met briefly at the Leaky Cauldron when Hermione had been handed off to the Snapes' care for the day, but it was a hurried thing because Hermione had been more than a little anxious to check on Evan after that cauldron explosion and his early departure, and to meet his mum after all this time reading about her in various books. "Hi! Mr and Mrs Snape, these are my parents, Ian and Heather Granger. Mum, Dad, these are Evan, my best friend, and his parents, Mr and Mrs Snape."

"Lily and Severus," Evan's mum said with a smile, extending her hand to Hermione's bemused mother, while the two fathers exchanged greetings of people more familiar to each other. "Pleasure to have met you, and I must say, Hermione is a true delight."

"Oh! Thank you, really. Hermione's told us quite a bit about your son, as well. She, ah, she mentioned that you were also... Muggle-born, is that the proper word?"

"I prefer to say nonmagical-born, but yes, that is the common vernacular," Evan's mum confirmed, and the four adults engaged in light small-talk, giving Hermione time to properly inspect Evan. He looked loads better than the last time she'd seen him, too. Two weeks ago, while there had still been circles under his eyes, his mood had already been vastly improved. It seemed that in spite of the fact they were leaving for months again, he wasn't as weighed down by anxiousness and sadness, and this buoyed her spirits too.

"You ok?" she asked, just to check.

"Yeah," Evan confirmed with a nod. "Mum and Dad talked with me about the homesickness, and I think it'll be better now. And, also, Dad's gonna come to Hogwarts once a week to teach me Occlumency, so I'll get to see him regularly."

"That's great," Hermione said, honestly pleased that he felt so much more optimistic. "Maybe then you can teach me, too?"

"Definitely. It's very useful, you know."

"Yes, you've only been telling me that for months," she agreed with a smile, earning herself a roll of his eyes. "Come on, let's find a compartment."

As neither of them had taken many things from Hogwarts for only two (or in Evan's case, three) weeks, there were no trunks to be carried in, and they used their backpacks and smaller suitcases, as well as Stheno's carrier, to mark a compartment for themselves, before disembarking to say good-bye to their parents. Their mums already seemed to have made a friendship, and their dads were more looking at their wives indulgently than communicating, but Hermione thought it a good thing in any case, because she'd noticed how lost her parents seemed in the wizarding world, and having a friend that would understand and help them would mean that they'd be able to understand Hermione better, too. She didn't like this feeling of discomfort that she'd started feeling whenever talk about her studies came up, and, of course, since she wasn't allowed to perform magic, she couldn't really show them anything properly. It was utterly frustrating, and she told Evan all of it once they were off towards Hogwarts.

"I'll write to my mum and explain it all to her," he promised. "I'm sure she'd love to have your parents over for tea sometime, and then she can show them magic. And, in the summer, you can all come over to our place and we can do magic there together."

"Oh, what about the summer practicals?"

"I'm not going to sign up for that; Mum and Dad can teach me loads more than I'd learn there, and besides, it's mainly for those who don't live in wizarding homes. It'd be great for you, though, and I'm sure once you show your proficiency, the supervisors will let you practice however you want. And when you come visit, Mum will teach us both. I'm sure you'll get it in a jiffy," he muttered with displeasure, and Hermione grimaced; Evan really wasn't very good at Charms, and he was almost abysmal at Transfiguration.

Thinking of Transfiguration reminded him of Harry Potter and what he'd told her two weeks ago, about Nicolas Flamel. She'd exchanged a letter or two with Evan over the holidays after their day out, but since she'd gone skiing with her parents, it had been pretty difficult for her to find owl post on the continent, so they'd kept it minimal and she'd completely forgotten to tell him all she'd learned on the train ride home when she _had_ had a proper chance.

Well, no time like the present.

"Nicolas Flamel?" Evan repeated once she'd explained it all to him. "Are you serious?"

"That's what Harry said," she confirmed. "He also said that whatever it is, it's relatively small. Why? Who is he?"

"He's only _the_ most famous alchemist in the Wizarding World," he told her, sounding quite disbelieving. "He's the only person who's ever managed to make a... Merlin, _that's_ what it is!"

"What?"

"The small thing on the third floor? It's the Philosopher's Stone!"

And _now_ the penny dropped, as Hermione immediately made the connections Evan had made when he'd heard the alchemist's name. She felt her eyes go wide as she stared at her best friend and breathed out a quiet 'oh'.

"But then, who'd want to steal it?"

"Who wouldn't?" Evan countered. "It's the only known working Philosopher's Stone. Flamel and his wife are practically immortal, so long as they can brew the Elixir of Life."

"Harry said that he'd heard a woman going towards it while he was coming to get me, when the troll was let in."

Evan frowned thoughtfully, not dismissing her words, but he didn't look too convinced, either.

"I suppose it's possible. Still, to think that there's a Cerberus in the school... I wonder if Mum knows about it."

"Wouldn't she had to have, if she's on the Council of Supervisors?"

Evan shrugged. "Dad always says that Dumbledore is going to do whatever he wants whether everyone else likes it or not, so maybe not. Still, this is _really_ good. Now all we have to figure out is whether someone trying to harm Potterprat during the Quidditch match has anything to do with the troll incident, and that'll help us figure out who's after the Stone."

"You know, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to include Harry in it. No, hear me out," she hurried to add the moment she saw Evan's scowl. "He's going to be looking into it, he's as nosey as you–"

"Hey!"

"–And obviously, it'd be useful to know what he's learned. He asked me to learn who Flamel is, so if I tell him, he'll be more inclined to share information with me. I'll keep you out of it, I promise, and you don't have to speak a word to him."

"Oh, I bet he wants to go after the thief himself," Evan said with an exasperated roll of his eyes. "He's already beat his father in becoming the youngest Quidditch player in a century, I bet he'll want to beat him in catching his first criminal, too." This was said with such a sneer and venom in his voice that Hermione blinked in surprise at him. Sometimes she forgot how much he hated Harry.

"Then we need to solve it first, and tell Professor Dumbledore," she decided with a nod. "He'll listen to you, and he'll make sure Harry doesn't do anything stupid."

"I don't know about that."

"Well, I do, and that's what we're doing. I'll make sure to give them as little information from now on as I can without making them suspicious, to slow them down and give us an advantage, and we're going to figure this out before they do something stupid."

"I'm not Potter's keeper, Mi! That berk's been a pain in my arse for months now!"

"And imagine what it'll be like if he does something stupid and gets himself hurt," she told him, a little pointedly. "He'll get all the attention, and probably mess up everything Professor Dumbledore's got planned for the Stone. And if he _does_ manage to stop the thief, then he'll also get all the attention and be an even bigger pain in your arse."

"Well... I suppose I'd be satisfying to see his face when we thwart him," her friend allowed thoughtfully. "It'd be a good revenge for all he and his cronies have done to me."

"What have they done to you?" she asked, alarms ringing in the back of her mind. Evan inhaled a little sharply and shrugged in what he probably thought was a casual way, but only served to make Hermione even more suspicious – she'd spent months learning his tells in order to be able to keep him from being overwhelmed by homesickness (and as she'd had to spend three _Defer_ slips since her birthday in order to get him out of some of his extremely dark moods, she'd made sure to learn his tells _well_ , because with him, it truly was far better safe than sorry), and she could read him when he was trying to keep something from her.

"The usual; spilled ink, destroyed potions, tripping me up and knocking my books out of my hands, the occasional prank or comment. It's starting to go on my last nerve, that's what I meant."

What _else_ had they done to him, that he'd try to hide it from her? And why would he want to, in any case? Hermione agreed with him in principle, Harry and his friends were being quite nasty to him, though they'd been nasty to her, too, and she'd changed their minds about herself with one little lie.

Perhaps she could use this situation to change their minds about Evan, too, and make them stop harassing him? Though, if Evan was keeping the worst things from her out of pride, she'd need to be careful about it, or he'd get angry with her.

If there was one thing Hermione had learned since spending time with Evan, it was that the ego of boys was a fragile thing, and they were going to do anything possible to keep it from being hurt. And her best friend? He was prideful in the extreme.

* * *

The second term of the school year started auspiciously enough for Harry and his friends, with Granger arriving to tell them that she'd managed to figure out who Nicolas Flamel was. Though Seamus had complained about her suddenly being in the know about their investigation, Harry, Ron and Dean were duly impressed with the bushy-haired little witch – Harry and Ron had spent a descent amount of time in the library after Harry had gotten over the worst of his cold, and they'd not been able to find out _anything_ , even if Harry had been sure he'd heard the name somewhere.

Now, thanks to Hermione, they had the vital clue that Harry knew would unravel the whole thing – the little package that Hagrid had taken from Gringotts was in fact the Philosopher's Stone, which could turn anything into gold and grant unlimited life.

That solved, all they could do for the time being was keep their eyes and ears open, and wait to see if anyone would attempt anything like the troll invasion again. In the meantime, Harry turned to the last of the three mysteries from the end of previous term – the Marauder's Map.

The first thing he did was find out whether the Map could still find him, even if he was under the Invisibility Cloak, because ever since Dumbledore had so easily caught him at the Mirror, Harry had begun wondering what else he'd been mistaken about. Thankfully, five days after the term started, Dumbledore called him up to his office – Sirius had come to Hogwarts to see Harry in lieu of their ruined Christmas plans. Once Dumbledore gave them their privacy, Sirius informed Harry that he'd arrived safely back in the country and with the fugitive he'd been chasing in Azkaban, awaiting trial, which made Harry grin from ear to ear and offer a congratulatory exuberant hug.

It turned out that Sirius couldn't remember whether the Invisibility Cloak could hide Harry from the Map.

"Sorry, Prongslet," he said with a regretful expression. "By the time we made the Map, James had had the Cloak for years, and we never thought to check specifically for this. We didn't use the Map to spy on each other, so it just never occurred to us to see about it."

"Great," Harry grumbled. "Ron and I think that the only ones in school right now who might have figured it out are Fred and George, and there's no way they'd just give us the Map if we asked them about it. But, if I'm still visible by the Map under the Cloak, then I can't just go into their dormitory and snoop around."

"We always kept the Map on our persons," Sirius confirmed, "so I imagine anyone else who's managed to pass the initiation rite and get the password would, too. And I agree, if anyone's got it, it'd be Molly's twins."

"Yeah, but Ron thinks they'd ask for something insane if we were to ask them for a trade, and we can't just nick it from them. We Junior Marauders are good at pranking, but Fred and George are pretty tough, and we're not ready for an all-out war yet. That's if they have it in the first place, which they might lie about just to mess with us, or to get something from us."

"You'll need to be smart about it," Sirius agreed. "Tell you what, Prongslet; I'll see with Remus about maybe figuring out some sort of tracking spell to help you at least confirm if they have it. Moony made it impervious to _Accio_ and I'm sure a bunch of other things, as well, so it might take some time."

"That'd be great, actually!" Harry said with a big smile. "So, can you tell me what all you did on the continent?"

"Not too much, but I can think of a few things you might find interesting."

Apparently, Sirius had travelled to the south-eastern part of the continent, to a country that was on the verge of war. Harry listened with wide eyes as Sirius described a little bit about his chase for the lawbreaking wizard, and about how the Wizarding Yugoslavia was organised, which sounded quite different from the way their own country worked. While it resembled Magical Britain in that it was composed of several big parts (and this was the reason for the possibility of Muggle war, because people from these regions didn't want to be in a single country anymore), they sounded _really_ separate, and didn't even have a common language like United Kingdom had English. Apparently, even among the Magical folk, there was tension regarding possible separation. And this was without getting into their political system, which Sirius tried to explain and decided in the end to leave to Remus and when Harry was a little older.

Dumbledore returned to his office about an hour after he'd left, and Sirius had to cut his story short. Harry, knowing when he wasn't wanted, gave Sirius another hug and waved at the Headmaster, before walking out of the office and closing the door behind him. He tried to eavesdrop in search of any more information, but either Dumbledore knew or the office was naturally warded against it, because he couldn't hear a single thing. Slightly disappointed by that, but in general in high spirits, he left to find his friends and tell them all about Sirius' adventure.

* * *

January turned into February with shocking speed, as the professors began piling on lessons and homework like there was no tomorrow. To top that off, sports clubs had picked up properly, which wouldn't have been much of an annoyance to anyone (and especially not Evan, who didn't even play a sport, let alone belong to a _club_ ), if not for the fact that, unlike Quidditch practice, they were held indoors, in a southern section of the castle that had been transformed to resemble rather closely a typical Muggle school gym, with hoops and goals and nets set up depending on the need (aside from the winter sports, of course, which were held outdoors; to Evan's mild consternation, Hermione had joined the skiing lessons with most of the other Muggle-borns and seemed to be enjoying herself immensely, to the point where she was starting to bug Evan about joining, too). This meant that the Quidditch players were complaining mightily about having to brave the Scottish winter, and the Quidditch Cup was about to pick up speed – after two games held in November and December, with January given to the students to fall back into the rote of the school year, the schedule was back on as of mid-February, with Slytherin playing Ravenclaw, which, in turn, meant that the Slytherin players were louder than usual about the weather conditions.

For his part, Evan firmly ignored them. His homesickness was back, though in waves and much weaker than it had been in the fall, and each time he saw his father (usually on Sundays in an empty classroom in the dungeons), Evan found that his good cheer could last a little longer. He also followed his mother's advice and wrote to her candidly, trying to approach his own emotional difficulties the way he approached a complicated or convoluted potions recipe, and that helped, too.

What helped the most, though, was Hermione, who always seemed to sense when he needed a little cheering up, and either managed to find something for them to do to get his mind off his homesickness, or else had Tracey, and, in one particularly spectacular instance, Theo, to do it for her. Evan had caught on to her little deception quickly enough, and, thinking back, had also remembered other times when she might have done it, as well. It had bruised his ego a little, but he'd praised her for it, though he couldn't but add that he'd been really off the previous semester and thus had an excuse for not seeing her being so successfully slytherin for this long.

"I knew you wouldn't be angry with me," she's told him with a beaming smile after he's informed her that he knew.

"So, now you're not against it anymore?" he'd asked her with suspicion.

"Oh, no, I'm still saying it's wrong. But... you're my best friend, and you're a Slytherin who taught me to do it in the first place, so... it's just different. I mean, if I'd thought you'd be angry with me even for a second, I would never have done it, but you were... I didn't like seeing you like that, is all."

"Thank you," he'd told her quietly and had hugged her, the first hug he'd ever initiated between them, feeling clumsy and unsure. But, Hermione had accepted it without reservation, the way his mum always did, and so Evan had found his mouth stretching into an involuntary smile, because he just knew this school year would have been a hell of a lot worse if not for Hermione Granger.

Ravenclaw won the Quidditch match, though Evan had put his foot down this time and refused to go with Tracey. Hermione had gone with Kevin and Stephen, her Ravenclaw friends, and had seemed to have enjoyed herself in a somewhat distant way that held promise she'd soon outgrow the typical Muggle-born fascination with the sport.

To say as little as possible about Tracey's wrath at their house losing _yet another_ Quidditch match was by far to the best, especially when Theo ended up angry with Evan for not being there to share the first brunt of her temper. But, that aside, Evan found himself liking his two Slytherin friends, the mousey girl and the reedy boy, more and more.

He found himself _dis_ liking Potter and his gang more and more at about the same rate. What had provoked the boys was anyone's guess, but they seemed to have upped their pranking to the point where most of the student body was becoming annoyed, and the Weasley twins were getting that manic look in their eyes that Evan knew to steer clear of. And, as had become the norm, they targeted Evan even more than they targeted any other student aside from Malfoy. The saving grace in this situation was that he only shared Potions Class with them, which meant that if he was a little creative with his routes to and fro, he could effectively avoid them. The inconvenience that had popped up was that, somehow or other, they'd found a way of keeping out of sight in most of their actions, which meant that Evan had even less protection by the Hogwarts faculty than before. By mid-February, he was getting so thoroughly sick of them that he finally decided even Hermione wouldn't fault him for getting some revenge.

So, one afternoon after his lesson with his father, while he was watching the man walk up to Dumbledore's office, when the perfect opportunity presented itself, Evan didn't hesitate. Seamus Finnigan was a floor above him, standing surreptitiously right behind the archway connecting the corridor to the stairway and looking up with quite some interest, towards where Evan's father had gone (the man always grumbled about the entrance to the Headmaster's quarters moving every so often, and this time it was located all the way on the seventh floor). He was clearly alone, and clearly preoccupied, and Evan was not a Slytherin for nothing.

Crouching down, he called Stheno, his ever-faithful shadow these days, over, and pointed to the Gryffindor on the floor above.

"Get him to the landing for me," he told her quietly, and his intelligent companion flicked her ears at him in understanding before padding quickly up the stairs, tail level with her body and quite straight, a clear indication she was on the prowl. Evan used that time to slink into an alcove right at the top of the stairs towards the dungeons that concealed him quite nicely, and waited. It took Stheno only about fifteen seconds to start climbing up the suit of armour in the corner of the stairway, making enough rattle that Finnigan came out to investigate. The moment he was in direct line of sight, Evan lifted his wand, reaching in for all the vindictive, impotent anger he felt towards Potter's lot.

" _Dedentatio_ ," he whisper-yelled, tugging with his wand sharply downward, and cast the Teeth-Pulling Hex; he'd never used it before, but it was one of the spells he'd found in one of his father's books, and was quite certain it wasn't Dark – there were some lines he knew not to cross even at eleven years of age, and using Dark magic against anyone but true enemies, such as in life-or-death situations, was definitely one of those. He'd studied it a bit and had come to the conclusion that it was most likely a derivative of one of the spells dental healers used, though designed to be offensive.

The spell hit Finnigan in the side, and he howled in pain, stumbling in his step and lifting his hands to clutch at his mouth; Stheno shot away from the suit of armour and up the stairs, making even more of a racket, and then, like cherry on a cake, Finnigan seemed to startle from that, too, and finally lose his footing, tripping over his own feet and, to Evan's shock, fallings straight down the stairs.

It was more of a sliding motion than a tumbling one for most of the way down, which was most likely very, very good for Finnigan, but his leg caught in the hand-rail about three quarters of the way down and tugged him sharply enough that Evan winced involuntarily – that had to have broken something. The boy was still conscious, and there was no blood coming out of his mouth that Evan had expected – so, the spell might have vanished the Gryffindor's teeth rather than pulled them out – but he was keening rather loudly and was not moving from where he'd crumpled on the ground floor. Loud, running footsteps were already audible, and Evan slipped down towards the dungeons as quietly as he could, trusting that his Kneazle would know to find the round way back.

In the end, Finnigan had to stay for almost three days in the hospital wing, and Hermione informed Evan that he'd needed Skele-Gro for everything to grow back that quickly, but that he'd not had any other injuries from the fall besides a few bruises and that broken leg. While Evan found himself quite satisfied with the whole thing, the added plus was from the fact that he'd targeted Finnigan, and Hermione was angry enough with him for giving her that disgusting nickname that she didn't even put any true effort into berating Evan for his actions. He knew this was as effective as declaring war on them, but by Merlin, it had felt good, and Evan had no intention of simply rolling over and letting them target him until kingdom come.

Evan held true to his promise to Neville Longbottom, as well, and spoke privately with Professor Slughorn about lending him and Neville one of the smallest laboratories for practice, which he did indeed get under the caveat of having an adult there to supervise. Evan ended up asking Professor MacCracken, as Neville seemed well accustomed to her after a semester of taking Muggle Culture, and she was a fellow Slytherin (because, no matter what his mother said on the topic of House importance in later life, the fact was that it helped one identify similar types of people, and Evan did by far prefer to deal with people he could actually understand). While Neville remained as insecure as he'd been since the first day, at least with Evan tweaking his tutoring style to incorporate the Gryfindor's vast knowledge on Herbology, Neville managed to get some measure of understanding as to the importance of the ingredient preparation and the brewing process itself, which was a clear win in the Slytherin's book.

Evan also found that Neville was surprisingly endearing, when he was distracted from his insecurities. When he got around to talking about things he held true interest in, he was as passionate as Evan himself, and that was the foundation that built a common ground between them – they weren't close friends by far, but at least they became proper study partners, and the tension in their Potions Class decreased dramatically, so long as either of the two camps – Potter's gang or Malfoy's – didn't interfere.

The other big thing that occupied Evan's mind was his Mental Magic training. He was still unable to find any proper symbol to use as a shield, though he and his father were trying out new ones every session. Moreover, he was proving to be quite abysmal at manipulating memories and creating false ones. His father's opinion was that, like his mother, Evan's emotions were so deeply tied to the memories, that in order to manipulate memories, he'd need to change the emotions associated, and that was far beyond his capabilities at the present moment. The same went for creating false ones, though one promising future path was using existing memories to piece together a semi-false one (unfortunately, still several years and quite a bit more understanding of his emotions away).

Legilimency was proving to be difficult for the same reason – every time Evan tried it, he ended up feeling the emotions in his father's memories quite keenly, until finally his father decided to simply Occlude all of those emotions in order for Evan to at least learn the very basics of Legilimency. While it was a relief, the obvious absence of the emotions always imbalanced Evan enough that his father expelled him quite easily, and only one truly good thing came out of the whole ordeal – Evan learned to pick up surface thoughts with stunning speed.

Legilimency, while not a mindreading skill, being far more evolved and complex than that, could, technically speaking, allow for the following of surface thoughts. It was a side technique of this branch of Mind Magic that had the main advantage of being unnoticeable by anyone not fully trained in Occlumency, and thus was the basis for various more complex Legilimency uses employed by those who specialised in spycraft – most expansive Legilimency techniques (and thus those most commonly used) were also quite blunt, in that they were very easily detectable by any Legilimencee who was paying the slightest bit of attention, and could become painful if the person being Legilimised had any sort of mental shields or Occlumency training in fighting back against the mind invasion. After all, digging through a waking mind was not something that could be hidden from said mind, no matter the skill, and at its core, Legilimency was far more about that than it was about teasing out the truth without alerting the mind to the monitoring. It was why most spies never really used Legilimency as a tool, and why those that did were the invariably the best of the best in their profession, because employing it without giving yourself away required far more than simply knowing an incantation and a rough way around a mind – it required knowing how to coax the target's mind into freely revealing the information in question while the Legilimens had access to it, without using magic to force it out. It required conversation and psychological manipulation, far more than any type of brute force.

Evan's book held a chapter on the subject of thought surfing, in which it was explained that most people found the thought streams to be wildly erratic and far too complicated to properly follow. Like everything else about the mind, surface thoughts weren't simply linear sentences that people spoke to themselves in their heads. There _were_ , of course, sentences, but far more than that, there were images and sounds, smells and touches, flashes of memories and associations, and, naturally, emotions. Severus theorised that the reason for Evan's ease with surface thoughts was exactly the same one as his troubles with deep Legilimency – the fact that he most easily picked up emotions in the minds of others, the main difference between the two being that with surface thoughts, he did not need to be submerged in the target's mind, but simply stick atop it, thereby avoiding being subsumed by those same emotions.

In this, his mother's advice regarding the way he should process his own emotional turmoils proved invaluable – sitting down and thinking any situation through allowed him better insight into why people might do certain things, and that translated into the ease of following mind associations. Granted, the only person he'd actually ever Legilimised was his father, someone deeply familiar to him, but he thought it might one day prove to be a very useful trait.

And now that he had at least some knowledge of the intrusive Mind Art, Evan was hopeful about figuring out how to merge his budding Legilimency skills with the thought amplification he'd developed, in order to find a way of overcoming his previous need for the recipient of his thoughts to be a Legilimens. If he could not only project his coherent thoughts _at_ another person, but _into_ their minds, then he was that much closer to telepathy of some sort, and he could think of all kinds of uses for that off the top of his head.

* * *

The snow in the immediate vicinity of the castle began melting at the end of February, leaving behind it slush and mud for early March. Evan stayed indoors as much as he could, though there was no way of avoiding the trek to the greenhouses for their Herbology lessons, and the entrance that led down that way was always quite muddy. The complaints of Quidditch players increased, and this time, Hufflepuffs added their voice to the mix, as the next Quidditch match was supposed to be between Gryffindors and them. If Gryffindor were to win, it'd push them ahead of Slytherin in the House Cup race for the first time in seven years, though not many truly cared for that – the Quidditch Cup was far more important to most, and the ranking system for that was far more evenly placed than the House Cup one.

Already thoroughly fed up with the stupid obsession with one dumb sport and having failed spectacularly at his lesson with his father, Evan was not in a good mood that Sunday when he trudged towards the library and ran into an extremely unpleasant sight – Neville, who was almost cowering against a wall, with Draco sodding Malfoy advancing on him with his wand drawn, Crabbe and Goyle grinning like idiots with their arms crossed over their chests. Neville's legs were strange-looking as well, and after a moment of study, Evan came to the unpleasant conclusion that there was a Leg-Locker Curse on him.

Really, if he'd learned one thing, it was that all bullies were alike, no matter what values they were proponents of, and he hated them all.

"...After all," Malfoy was saying, "you're far too cowardly to be in Gryffindor, so you really should–"

"Oh, for Merlin's sake, Malfoy," Evan said with a huff, slipping past Crabbe and Goyle before they even realised they were supposed to block him, "find someone your own size to pick on."

"And why would you care?" Malfoy asked, shooting glares at his bodyguards for not having stopped Evan.

"Because this is just disgraceful for a Slytherin."

Malfoy's face turned a nasty red colour of anger.

"What do _you_ know of Slytherin honour, your Blood Traitor spawn? Your father married that Mudblood who fancies herself–"

Evan didn't hear anything past the word 'Mudblood' and the fact that Malfoy was talking about his _mother_. Uncontrollable fury rose in his throat, and swept Evan like a tide, into the echoes of his father's memory of that horrible incident that had almost split his parents up permanently before they'd even gotten together, into his own distress at his father's actions and his disgust at the word, into the memories of Hermione's quiet upset at being called that, into the hatred of that bloody divide that it represented, into all the negativity he'd ever associated with that _fucking_ word in his short life, until there was nothing but a red haze in front of his eyes and in his muscles, burning through him and leaving ashes in its wake.

The fury expelled itself with his magic, through his wand and through the rest of him, too, and when it was gone and he could finally see properly again, there was carnage around him – Malfoy was on the floor, curled up in a protective little ball, releasing panicked moaning, mumbling sounds interspersed with shockingly loud and fast nasal inhalations and exhalations, while Crabbe and Goyle lay unconscious, well to the side. Only Neville was still standing, though by his wide eyes and chalky white face, it was clear enough that he was terrified witless.

Breathing heavily and fighting to stay on his feet as the fatigue of expelling so much magic crashed into him, Evan tried to think of what to do. His wand was in his hand, there was a memory replaying on his retinas, of using a spell on Malfoy, a Dark curse that blocked the airways to suffocate the victim. Panic rose up to replace the anger in a flash, and he tried to run to the other Slytherin boy, stumbling and falling on his knees on the way, instantly frantic to figure out how to reverse it before Draco ran out of air, because he couldn't stomach the thought of possibly killing a classmate, not ever.

It took far too long for his desperate, panicking brain to realise that the curse obviously hadn't worked properly, that it had done something to Draco's mouth, glued it shut somehow, but that the boy was still breathing through his nose, himself panicking and turning pale from hyperventilating. Bad, bad, bad, he was going to knock himself unconscious if he didn't stop, and Evan grabbed him by his bicep, squeezing too tightly, as he started almost yelling in the boy's ear: "Stop panicking, Malfoy, stop!"

It was his words, or maybe his bruising grip on the boy's arm, he didn't care, but Draco froze momentarily, grey eyes staring fearfully at Evan before he instinctively began matching his inhales and exhales to Evan's own, even as he attempted to mumble something past lips that wouldn't separate.

Gathering up what little strength he had left, Evan threw a Leg-Locker counter-curse at Neville, freeing him up; the pudgy boy released a choked whimper and took a step back, and Evan felt his panic coming back like a tide.

"Neville, get help," he croaked, looking at the scared Gryffindor. "Now."

Neville's blue eyes flew from Evan to Malfoy to Crabbe and Goyle and back to Evan, before he was running, sprinting down the corridor in the direction of the hospital wing, half-stumbling every other step but somehow managing to remain upright. As soon as he was out of sight, Evan looked down at the blond child in front of him, the boy who'd called his mother a _Mudblood_ , and his anger mixed with his panic in a heady, uncontrollable sensation of frustrated fury that made him squeeze his fingers as hard as he could, one hand's nails slicing his palm, the other hand's digging into Malfoy's flesh until the boy squealed under breath.

" _Never_ call my mother that," Evan snarled at him, purging all the venom left in his veins. "Not _ever_."

Then suddenly, Dumbledore was there, rushing from the direction of his office, and Evan was being pulled away from his classmate, anger flickering out like a candle and leaving the comprehension of what he'd done, leaving the thought of everyone _knowing_ what he'd done–

He felt magic gather in the air around him as Dumbledore reversed the curse Evan had inadvertently thrown at Malfoy – he didn't even know its name, he couldn't remember where he'd read about it, and it had worked wrong, it should have stopped him breathing altogether, he only got lucky, but if it hadn't gone wrong, he'd have not been able to fix it, he'd have permanently hurt Draco, and he was not Dark, _he was_ _not Dark_ , he'd never wanted to do anything like this, but that word, that _fucking word_ –

"Evan, I need you to look at me now," Dumbledore's voice said, very close to him, ancient and powerful. "Look at me."

Blinking, Evan lifted his eyes away from his legs to meet the old man's, and bit his lip to stop his tears from coming, struggling for every breath that he had to take through his nose and that didn't seem nearly enough to fill his lungs.

"Breathe, now," Dumbledore said, cupping his face with his wrinkled hands. "Deep breaths."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Evan realised that he was having a full-blown panic attack, but mostly he was preoccupied with the frantic chant of _Didn't mean to do it, didn't mean to do it, not Dark, didn't mean to do it didn't mean to do it didntmeantodoit_ and the building fear of never being able to breathe again, and wouldn't he just deserve it after all.

" _Aspiro_ ," Madam Pomfrey's voice said, and suddenly, Evan's lungs expanded of their own accord, air hissing loudly as it was sucked up past Evan's lips. White spots appeared in his vision, and he clenched his eyes tightly shut as he took one greedy breath after another.

"That's it, deep breaths."

"I'm sorry," Evan panted. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I'm not, not, I'm not–"

"Calm, now," Dumbledore murmured, running his papery fingers over Evan's brow and bringing forced lethargy with them. "Mr Malfoy will be quite all right."

Evan clutched the Headmaster's sleeve and stared desperately into the old wizard's eyes.

"I didn't mean to do it, I'm not Dark, Gramps, I didn't–"

"You're not Dark," Dumbledore confirmed and Evan's exhausted mind couldn't but believe him. "Calm now. Can you stand?"

Shakily, Evan tried to put his feet under him, clutching Dumbledore's arms as the man pulled him up. Neville was hiding in the shadows, observing the scene, and Crabbe and Goyle were awake, though they looked extremely disoriented. To Evan' side, Madam Pomfrey had conjured a stretcher for Malfoy, who was still curled on the ground, choking on sobs but still breathing, still fine.

"He – what will he–"

"He will be perfectly all right by tomorrow," the Hogwarts Matron confirmed. "The Curse was only half-formed, it won't leave any lasting damage as soon as I heal his mouth properly."

"Can you tell me what happened?" Dumbledore asked.

"I... I ran into him bullying Neville – the Leg-Locker Curse, I think he'd cast it – and I – I tried to get him to stop, but then he – he called Mum the M-word, and I just – I lost it, I wasn't thinking anything, I – it just came out, I never even thought the curse, I don't know how to cast it, I swear, I – I only read about it once, I'd never – Dad would never have let me, or, or Mum either..."

"We believe you," Dumbledore assured him. "You understand that even if this was Accidental Magic, there have to be consequences?"

"Yes, sir," Evan murmured, nodding his head as he looked towards his shoes and swaying on his feet; he felt light-headed, cottony.

"Very well; come, now. To the hospital wing with you all."

And so Evan spent the afternoon under the influence of a Sleeping Draught, because Madam Pomfrey had tutted that his Magical Core was extremely depleted, while Malfoy slept off the stress and pain of his mouth cavity healing on the other side of the room. Crabbe and Goyle, who'd simply been knocked out by his magic, as well as Neville, were released to return to their dormitories, though Neville wondered back to the hospital wing after dinner, looking reluctant and deeply uncomfortable.

"I, um..." he began once Evan had managed to sit himself up in bed. "I just wanted to... to say... thank you."

"You're not... afraid of me, are you?" Evan asked, unable to keep the trepidation from creeping into his voice. He didn't want to be someone who frightened people.

"No, I... I understand," Neville said, finally lifting his eyes to meet Evan's. "It was Accidental Magic. And you didn't hurt me, just him."

"He's wrong, about what he said," Evan told him. "You're worth twelve of Malfoy. And the Sorting Hat put you in Gryffindor, didn't it? It doesn't make mistakes like that."

Neville offered him a peculiar little smile that made Evan frown.

"What?"

"Nothing, just... Harry said the same thing."

Evan stuck his tongue out in disgust, and Neville actually released a quiet little giggle.

"Did Professor Dumbledore say anything about your punishment?"

"Just that it won't be as bad as it would have been if I'd meant to do it. Oh, and that Malfoy will also be punished, for attacking you."

"That's good, right?"

Evan shrugged.

"To tell you the truth, Neville, I'm sorry for... for the curse that I used, but I'm not gonna let him disrespect my mum like that, not ever. So, if I have to scrub a room for Filch or sort through disgusting potions ingredients, that's fine."

Neville nodded and stood up. "I'll see you around, then."

"Yeah, you too."

Malfoy got released from the hospital wing the very next morning, his demeanour much subdued. Evan didn't run into Mr Malfoy in the whole thing, so whatever the blond's father might or might not have done about the fact that Evan had put the boy in the hospital wing, it didn't reach Evan's ears. He hoped he'd not made too much trouble for his dad on that front – he knew that his dad and Lucius Malfoy had some sort of connections – though he could imagine quite easily how it might have looked.

Theo was the one to tell him he thought Mr Malfoy wasn't even aware that anything had happened – it was quite common that these sorts of student fights went unreported if no one was injured beyond what Madam Pomfrey could fix in an afternoon and if there was no cause to believe they'd be repeating, the task of disciplining children having been given to their Heads of Houses by the parents. Moreover, Theo's opinion was that Malfoy would not dare tattle to his dad, either, because it would look bad for him; after all, he'd been bested by what had turned out to be just a harmless spell effect while he was blatantly attacking a weak student less capable of defending himself. Whether this was the true reason or not, Evan wasn't sure – he thought there was possibly something more to it – but he also didn't much care about digging up the whole truth of it when he was already in trouble for what had happened. What he cared about was that Malfoy looked more than ready to sweep the whole thing under the rug and pretend that Evan didn't exist (which was more than he'd been giving Evan all year, what with his jeers about Hermione and having to work with Neville during Potions Class, and those roundabout digs at Evan's night terrors), and so long as he understood not to insult Evan's parents ever again, the black-haired boy was content to leave it at that.

Professor Slughorn summoned them to his office the day after the incident and demanded to hear the story first-hand. Again, completely uncharacteristically, Malfoy kept mum instead of bursting into his own justifications, as Evan had expected him to. So, Evan kept silent, too, not wanting to be the one to levy all the blame (because, if for nothing else, Malfoy certainly could blame Evan for the attack).

"Come now," Professor Slughorn said, frowning at them. "I have heard it multiple times already, there is little point to your silence. Mr Malfoy, did you attack Mr Longbottom with the Leg-Locker Curse?"

Malfoy glared at Professor Slughorn but stayed silent.

"We know you did; that was the last spell performed by your wand. Mr Snape, did you attack Mr Malfoy with the Airway-Sticking Curse?"

Evan swallowed and nodded. "It was Accidental Magic. I don't even know how to cast the spell."

"That is a Dark Curse, Mr Snape. What did Mr Malfoy say that could have caused such a case of Accidental Magic?"

"He called my mum a, ah... a Mudblood," he forced the word through his clenched teeth. Slughorn's visage darkened considerably, and he shot a cool look Malfoy's way.

"Is that so? Mr Malfoy, I trust that you have learned your lesson in this regard?"

"Yes... sir," Malfoy spat out through clenched teeth, curling his fingers into fists.

"Very well, then. You will both lose twenty-five points, for attacking another student, and will be serving detention that I will arrange for you."

"Detention?! He nearly killed me!"

"He did no such thing," Slughorn overrode the blond. "Madam Pomfrey has assured me that you've gotten off very lightly, considering how dangerous that Curse is when performed correctly. And the Headmaster himself has assured me that this was, indeed, a case of Accidental Magic, which I trust, Mr Malfoy, that you know very well is called _accidental_ for a reason. Now, is there any need for me to separate you for the rest of the year?"

Evan glanced at Malfoy and met his grey eyes. Then he turned to Slughorn and shook his head.

"No, sir, not on my part. I'm fine with him if he doesn't insult my parents."

"Very well. Mr Malfoy?"

After a moment or two of tense silence, Malfoy's eyes fell down to the floor.

"No, sir," he murmured.

"Good. Now, I want you both to apologise to each other for what had happened."

"What?" they both said at the same moment, staring at the portly man as if he'd lost his head somewhere.

"Now, if you please."

Clenching his teeth, Evan kept silent. Letting Malfoy be was one thing; a _pologising_ to him for defending his mother was completely another.

It seemed that Malfoy was of the same opinion, because he also remained stubbornly silent.

"Gentlemen, I will not repeat my words," Slughorn said forbiddingly, for the first time seeming like the true disciplinarian that a Slytherin could be. "Mr Malfoy, you first."

"But why–"

"Because I said so."

In bad grace, Malfoy turned to Evan and muttered his apology: "I'm sorry for insulting your mother, Snape," so Evan had no other choice but to reply with his own: "I'm sorry for not having more control over my magic." He was damned if he would apologise for the cursing itself – Malfoy would have been cursed either way, of that Evan had no doubt, but he also knew that he would have used something far more harmless, and for _that_ , he actually was sorry.

As they left Slughorn's office, Evan found himself relieved that he'd finally been able to escape the extremely uncomfortable situation.

Of course, the lecture Evan got from his father the next time they met for Occlumency practice made the whole ordeal with Slughorn seem like a pleasant memory in comparison.

* * *

"I've seen that man in black again," Seamus told Harry a few days before the Quidditch match.

"That's, what, the fourth time since the hols?"

"Yeah. Twice at the beginning, then right before that sodding Slytherin attacked me, and again on Sunday."

"Speaking of, when are we finally mounting our attack on him?" Dean asked, for once fully on board with their revenge plan.

"Not yet," Harry said with a shake of his head. "You heard what happened with him and Malfoy; we need to be careful, or else he'll do the same thing to us, and besides, he's under far too much scrutiny right now. It's too risky if we don't want to get caught."

"But we _are_ going to do it," Ron assured Seamus. "He won't get away with what he did to you."

The three days had been particularly painful for poor Seamus; not only did Madam Pomfrey have to regrow all his teeth, but his leg had also been broken and had needed serious mending. Madam Pomfrey had forced Seamus to take a dose of the Skele-Gro Potion, which Seamus later described as horrible – apparently, the potion drastically sped up the formation of bone and other similar parts of the body, but the pain one had to endure was the same. With teeth, Madam Pomfrey had explained to Seamus, who'd then explained it to Harry, Ron and Dean, there was the problem of permanent teeth being larger than the initial set that Seamus had lost in the attack, which meant that she'd had to magically force the molars to stay put until Seamus' jaw was large enough to allow space for them, and this had caused additional discomfort while the Skele-Gro had tried to make them grow. As a result, Seamus was quite furious with Snape (though Harry couldn't help but forget that they had no true proof that it _was_ Snape in the first place, as their animosity towards Malfoy was at about the same levels, and it was equally possible that it had been Malfoy who'd attacked Seamus), and Harry was hard-pressed to distract him until the opportunity for retaliation showed up.

The mysterious man in black was exactly the sort of distraction he could use.

"Well, if he _is_ the one who attacked me during the Quidditch match, Dumbledore promised to be at this one, so I'm sure he won't try anything."

"Yes, but how come he's here so often? Shouldn't Dumbledore know about someone dangerous just popping up in the castle every so often?"

"Maybe he's here in official capacity," Ron suggested. "The Board is full of Pure-bloods like Malfoy who were on You-Know-Who's side during the War. Then Dumbledore would have to let him come, wouldn't he, when the Board and the Council are even above _him_."

"Well, so long as he knows that the man's in the castle, I'm sure he won't be able to do anything," Harry decided. "Still, we'll stay prepared."

"And the Quidditch match?"

"Sirius will be there, and some other Aurors, too, so it should be fine."

This proved to be quite true; when Harry walked out on the Quidditch pitch on the day of the match, he saw several witches and wizards in the red official Auror robes positioned around the stands, and Sirius was among them. He waved at Harry with a smile, which Harry returned in kind, before they all cast off the ground and the game began.

In all, it proved to be a rather anti-climactic game – Harry managed to catch the Snitch in five minutes, which had to be some sort of record, and it got Gryffindor in the lead for the House Cup, but it barely left time for any true play by the other players. Dean used that to make a few very pointed remarks about the points system of the game, pulling them all into the same discussion Harry had had with him at the train ride.

While Seamus and Ron seemed quite absorbed in arguing about it with Dean, Harry separated from them to get his broom back into the broomshed and see if he could find Sirius. He'd had one of the unpleasantly vivid dreams the previous night that had allowed him to witness something suspicious and wanted to share all of it with his godfather.

Throughout his life, Harry had had a handful of dreams that were so vivid and frightening, he'd ended up sleeping in Sirius' big bed just to be able to fall asleep again. Their common motif was roaming in a forest, and they were always filled with some sort of frightening sensation Harry had never managed to parse out. He always ended up getting headaches after them and being irritable the whole next day, so to get one the night before an important Quidditch match had annoyed him to no end.

This time, though, the dream had been truly frightening – Harry had been hunting a unicorn of all things, for some reason that had, in the dream, seemed logical, but upon waking, terrifying (though Harry didn't remember what that reason had actually been; he just knew how it made him feel to think back on it). Thankfully, he'd woken up before anything had happened, but the very thought of dreaming that had been horrible, because, if there was one thing about magical creatures he knew, it was that one did _not_ attack unicorns for any reason whatsoever. Still, he'd not been able to fall back asleep, and had spent the rest of the night sitting on the dorm window, petting Cybèle, and had thus been able to see someone running out of the Forbidden Forest towards the castle. This was what he wanted to get Sirius' opinion on, because if that wasn't suspicious, Harry didn't know what was.

He dawdled a little once he reached the wooden structure, enjoying the quiet of the afternoon and the pretty way in which the sun made Hogwarts almost glow in a reddish-golden colour, basking in the praise and happiness of his whole house and his friends, at the fact that he was becoming famous for his _own_ deeds, and not for the sacrifice his parents had made for him to live. He wished their actions to stand for themselves, had wished that since he was very young, and having something of his own was a nice feeling, too.

That was probably why he managed not to miss a hooded figure walking swiftly over the grass from the castle to the Forbidden Forest. His internal alarms ringing, Harry clutched his broom a little tighter as he decided what he should do. After everything that had happened this year and last night, this was far too suspect to just let pass (what if it was the same person as last night?), but he knew very well what sorts of things resided in the Forbidden Forest – Remus had made sure to warn him off wandering around in it – and he was a little reluctant to actually go there.

So, perhaps going _in_ was dangerous, but surely flying _over_...

Harry jumped onto the Nimbus Two Thousand and cast off, making sure to fly far enough so as not to be noticed, but close enough to still be able to track the hooded figure. He lost the figure in the Forbidden Forest, where the trees were far too dense for any visibility, and dived to fly right over the treetops in circles in an attempt to spot anything suspicious.

Voices reached him on one of the passes, and he landed noiselessly on a tree close-by, clambering down to a lower branch in order to be able to see who the heck was speaking down under.

It was a small clearing, little more than a big patch that lacked any trees, and in it were two people – Professor Quirrell, stuttering horribly and almost shaking, and looming over him was a familiar man with a head of wavy black hair tied neatly back, in impeccably tailored robes. Harry, who'd grown up looking at the aristocratic features of the Blacks, easily recognised Sirius' younger brother Regulus Black.

Shocked, he clung to the branch and strained to hear what they were talking about, because why in the _world_ would Uncle Regulus have anything to do with the stuttering professor?

"...D-don't know why you wanted t-t-to meet here of all p-places, Regulus..."

"Privacy, Quirinus," Regulus answered. "I doubt you'd want _this_ talk to be overhead by nosey children, after all. The old fool had gone through quite a bit of trouble to keep the Philosopher's Stone from becoming common knowledge, and you and I both know you'd want it kept that way."

Quirrell mumbled something, and Harry leaned forward in order to hear at least a word or two, without avail.

"Have you figured out how to get past the protections, then?" Regulus cut him off.

"B-b-but, Regulus, I d-don't–"

"Do you take me for a fool?" the Black patriarch demanded coldly. "I don't think you'd want me for an enemy, Quirinus, if you have any sense in your head."

"I-I don't know what you–"

"You know perfectly well to what I am referring, so let us stop with this little farcical back-and-forth, shall we?"

Quirrell opened his mouth to respond, but an owl hooted a close by, startling Harry so badly he almost fell out of the tree. By the time he steadied himself, some vital piece of information had slipped him by, because Regulus was speaking again, saying: "–Wanted for yourself."

"B-but I d-d-don't–"

"Give it a think, Quirinus," Regulus interrupted him, "and consider very carefully where your loyalties lie. And when you decide which is more important to you, we'll have another chat."

And with those parting words, Regulus whirled in his spot, throwing the hood over his head as he stalked back towards Hogwarts, leaving Quirrell to stand very, very still and stare after him.

Harry remained absolutely quiet until Quirrell left, too, then hurried back to find his friends (in their dormitory, and with Neville nowhere in sight, which was a good thing as he needed privacy for this) and tell them of this latest development.

"Wasn't Regulus Black accused of being a Death Eater?" Ron said in a harsh whisper.

"Yeah, but he wasn't found guilty," Harry replied. "I don't know anything much about it, but I think Sirius and Dumbledore had something to do with it." He kept to himself the fact that he'd actually seen Regulus' Dark Mark once; Sirius had been very adamant about keeping that secret, and for all the other rules he'd tried to impose, keeping secrets was the one that Harry knew to never, ever break.

"What if he's working with the man in black?" Seamus suggested. "If they knew each other from that time, were both Death Eaters, maybe they want the Stone for something sinister of the like."

"Yeah, but what? Voldemort's not been seen in eleven years," Harry pointed out. "And as far as I know, any Death Eaters worth their salt are in Azkaban, except maybe Malfoy and Nott, but I've heard Sirius and Remus talking about them, and it didn't sound like they'd want _him_ back."

"Maybe glory and money? Isn't that what all Death Eaters want? And eternal life, don't forget that part."

"True," Harry agreed with his best friend. He didn't see why else anyone would join that maniac.

"Wait, you keep saying that," Dean interrupted them. "Death Eaters?"

"You-Know-Who's followers," Ron explained. "The really important ones have a tattoo on their forearms in the shape of a snake coming out of the skull's mouth, the Dark Mark."

"I'm sorry... _Death Eaters_?"

"Hey, we didn't get to pick the names," Harry pointed out with a shrug. "No one said Voldemort had a creative bone in his body, did they?"

"Can we focus on more important things now?" Seamus demanded. "Like the fact that there might be Death Eaters after the Stone?"

"Right, but what would they want with Quirrell, then?" Dean asked. "I mean, he's completely useless as is."

"I think he's also helping to guard the Stone," Harry said thoughtfully. "Regulus mentioned that there was more than one protection, and he talked about loyalties. I bet he was trying to recruit Quirrell away from Dumbledore. Or coerce, more like; Quirrell looked terrified."

"So, what you're saying is that Quirrell's the one standing between the Stone and _Death Eaters_?" Ron hissed, eyes widening. "It'll be gone by next Tuesday!"

"And then who the hell knows what _they'd_ try to do with it," Seamus agreed darkly.


	19. Ch 18: The Norwegian Ridgeback

**Chapter 18: The Norwegian Ridgeback**

Contrary to Ron's assertion, Quirrell not only withstood until next Tuesday, but well beyond – though Harry and his friends never saw Regulus again, nothing changed drastically regarding the blocked third floor corridor and no other alarms were raised, either. Quirrell did become gaunter and paler as days turned into weeks, but on the whole, he seemed to still be standing.

Not that Harry was very invested in the man's wellbeing beyond that; he'd begun skipping as many DADA classes as he could get away with, because his head always hurt horribly from the man's smelly turban – he was starting to think he might be allergic to garlic, since he couldn't think of anything else that could cause his headaches and that had to do with Quirrell – and, in truth, he'd been able to cover most of the curriculum for that class on his own, anyway. Aurora Sinistra, the Deputy Head of Gryffindor House and the Astronomy teacher, had admonished him about it a few times, but since Quirrell wasn't one for giving grades in classes, and Harry had all his assignments efficiently done and promptly delivered, his grades didn't suffer and he wasn't bugged about it much.

He debated on whether he should let Sirius know what he'd seen and what they all thought regarding the Philosopher's Stone, but in the end decided not to. For one thing, he wasn't certain that Sirius could do anything about it, which would just leave him in one of his brooding moods, and for another, no matter how much he turned it around in his head, Harry couldn't find one concrete piece of evidence that would be enough for a seasoned Auror to believe him. The conversation he'd overheard between Quirrell and Regulus was vague enough that Sirius might just dismiss it due to his relationship with his brother, and Harry himself hadn't actually seen the man in black, so he couldn't very well describe him to his godfather's satisfaction.

The study groups began reforming as March turned to April, including Harry and Padma's. None of the Ravenclaws seemed nearly as crazed about it as Bushyworm, and the Junior Marauders kept well away from her, afraid of getting caught in the whirlwind. Snape, at least, didn't seem to mind, though that suited Harry even less, because it was making him harder to reach for the revenge they wanted to dish out. His Kneazle, now twice the size it had been at the beginning of the year, also tended to prowl around him and keep watch. So, given all that, Harry got the others to fall back to their usual little pranks; revenge was a dish best served cold, Dean told them was the Muggle saying, and Harry could be patient when it counted.

On one such study occasion, Ron caught sight of Hagrid's head peeking over the top shelves, and elbowed Harry to let him know. Exchanging significant looks with his boys, Harry faked a stretch and rose to his feet, pretending that he wanted to see if there was a book on Muggle History of the Persian Empire that they could use.

As soon as he was out of sight from the inquisitive girls, he sprinted to Hagrid and slid on his sneakers to offer the half-giant a big grin.

"Hi, Hagrid!"

"Harry!" Hagrid exclaimed, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to turn around and hide the book he'd picked off the shelf. "What're ya doin' here?"

"Just studying," Harry answered with a shrug. "You?"

"Jus' lookin'." Hagrid's eyes narrowed as he stared Harry down. "Yer not still lookin' fer Nicolas Flamel, are yeh?"

Seeing his chance, Harry grinned and shook his head. "Oh, no, we figured that out ages ago," he said carelessly. "Of course, now it makes sense why that package you took from Gringotts was so small; I bet the Philosopher's St–"

"Shhh!" Hagrid looked this way and that to make certain no one was paying attention to them. "Don' go shoutin' about it, what's the matter with yeh, Harry?"

"Oh, but I wanted to ask you; d'you know what else is guarding the Stone apart from Fluffy–"

" _Shhh_! A'right, listen – come an' see me later. I'm not promisin' I'll tell yeh anythin', mind, but don' go rabbitin' about it in here, students aren' s'pposed ter know. They'll think I've told yeh–"

"Ok, sure," Harry agreed quickly enough he thought Hagrid would figure out he'd been played, but it seemed that his relief overcame his common sense, because he relaxed his arms and gave Harry a beady-eyed smile.

"Yer a good kid, Harry," he said, ruffling Harry's wild hair as he passed him on his way to the library exit. Still, his immense height meant that Harry was on a perfect eyesight level to see what book he'd picked – one on dragons, of all things. Narrowing his eyes as he watched the half-giant's retreating form, Harry thought back to what he'd heard Remus and Sirius say about the man.

If he wasn't mistaken, Hagrid had a big affinity for all kinds of magical creatures, the more dangerous, the better. And dragons? Dragons were the top of that list.

So what on Earth was Hagrid up to, because he had to have known, just like everyone else in Wizarding Britain, that dragon breeding was prohibited by law?

* * *

The later that Harry was supposed to see Hagrid at turned out to be as soon as Seamus could get their study group disbanded, which meant that the four Junior Marauders were in Hagrid's hut less than two hours later. To their considerable discomfort, the hut was stiflingly hot, with the fire blazing in the grate, and one could barely see anything from all the curtains being drawn.

Having spent some time getting to know Hagrid over the winter hols (and Harry did genuinely like the half-giant), Harry and Ron knew to avoid the stoat sandwiches he offered, managing to warn Seamus and Dean off in the nick of time (if it had only been Dean, they wouldn't have, but Seamus could hold a grudge worse than Sirius' mother, so it was much more advisable not to have fun at the Irish boy's expense), though they did accept the tea.

"So – yeh wanted to ask me somethin'?"

"Yes," Harry said with a nod, taking the lead. "What do you know about the protections for the Philosopher's Stone?"

"We know there are a bunch of wards on the corridor itself, and Fluffy, of course," Seamus added. "But, is there anything else?"

"Can't tell you what I don' know myself. And, yeh know too much already, so I wouldn' tell yeh if I could," Hagrid protested.

Harry exchanged looks with his friends, making certain they were all on the same page, before turning back to the half-giant.

"Hagrid, we think someone's out to steal it."

"O' course they are, Harry, tha's why Dumbledore had me remove it from Gringotts."

"Yes, but we think we know who they are," Dean said leadingly. "And we can't really prove any of it, but it would really help us to know that it's very well guarded."

"We know Dumbledore trusts _you_ , but who else does he trust enough to have them protect it?"

Hagrid's beard twitched, and he straightened up a little at Harry's words. Ron and Dean beamed at Harry from their spots.

"Well, I don' s'pose it could hurt ter tell yeh that... Fluffy's mine, o' course... then there's Professor Sprout – Professor Flitwick – Professor McGonagall – Dumbledore himself did somethin', o' course. Hang on, I've forgotten someone."

"Quirrell?" Ron suggested.

"Tha's right, Professor Quirrell, an' maybe Professor Slughorn."

So, all Heads of Houses, plus DADA instructor and old Dumbles himself. At least that gave them some idea of what to expect. The question, then, was whether Regulus or the man in black had gotten information out of any of them aside from Quirrell, or even attempted it.

"You're the only one who knows how to get past Fluffy, aren't you, Hagrid?" Ron asked.

"You've not told anyone, have you?" Dean jumped in, eyes widening in alarm.

"Not a soul knows except me an' Dumbledore," Hagrid answered with pride.

"That's something," Seamus muttered. "And why's it so stinking hot in here? Can we open a window, Hagrid?"

That reminded him.

Craning his neck to inspect the fire, Harry squinted against the bright glare.

"Hagrid, what's _that_?"

The 'that' in question was a huge, black egg, sitting right in the middle of the fire underneath the kettle.

"Wow, that's a dragon egg," Ron said in hushed awe. "Dad's been telling us about them ever since the winter hols. It must have cost a fortune. Where did you get it, Hagrid?"

"Won it," was the answer. "Las' night. I was down in the village havin' a few drinks an' got into a game o' cards with a stranger. Think he was quite glad ter get rid of it, ter be honest."

"Is that what you've been looking for in the library?" Harry asked him. "A book on dragon care?"

"Yep. _Dragon-Breeding for Pleasure and Profit_. It's a bit outta date, o' course, but it's all in here. Keep the egg in the fire, 'cause their mothers breathe on 'em, see, an' when it hatches, feed it on a bucket o' brandy mixed with chicken blood every half hour. An' see here – how ter recognise diff'rent eggs – what I got there's a Norwegian Ridgeback. They're rare, them."

Ron's eyes widened and darted nervously to the egg, as if expecting it to hatch any moment now. Meanwhile, Seamus frowned.

"Hagrid, this is a wooden house. Mite difficult to keep a fire-breathing dragon in it."

Not that Hagrid heard them, of course. They left soon after, and spent the evening debating on what to do about the whole thing. Dean was all for telling Dumbledore, but Harry thought that should be a last resort; Hagrid was often a little unreasonable, but even he'd have to see sooner rather than later that there was no way for him to keep a _Norwegian Ridgeback_ in his hut.

"If we get Dumbledore involved, then the Board and the Council will have to get involved, and Sirius said that Hagrid was tossed out of Hogwarts way back when exactly because he was keeping illegal magical creatures on school grounds. They'll fire him and kick him off the grounds, and Hogwarts has been his home for years, he's got nowhere else to go. No, we can't let that happen."

"So what would you suggest, then?" Dean asked him. "Obviously, we can't let him just keep it."

"Charlie," Ron decided. "I'll write to him first thing tomorrow, ask him about sending someone 'round to pick it up."

"There's no way Hagrid is going to let anyone take that egg from him," Harry argued. "At least not until it hatches and he sees for himself that he can't keep it."

"And we can't make a scene or else we risk someone figuring it out," Seamus concluded. "So, do we just let him have it for a while?"

"Yeah, but we're not helping him with it," Ron decided with a nod. "That way he'll get desperate faster and be willing to let us have it sooner. I'll wait until it hatches to write to Charlie; it'll take at least a week for him to get back to us anyway, and that'll be enough time to convince Hagrid to let us have it."

"Too bad we can't use that dragon for a prank," Seamus muttered. "I bet we'd have the Twins beat then."

"Too risky," Harry said with a shake of his head. "Besides, Norwegian Ridgebacks are poisonous as well as fire-breathing; if it were to bite someone, we'd get in serious trouble."

"I know," his friend agreed with a sigh. "But just imagine all sort of bloody awesome pranks we could have made with a baby dragon."

They could, at that, all four agreed, but for once, the costs far outweighed the benefits, and they didn't revisit the topic.

Less than a week later, Cybèle flew in with Hagrid's note that the egg was hatching, and they ended up sacrificing their lunch break to go down to the hut and see for themselves. By then the dragon had already hatched, and was on its way to turning Hagrid's hut upside down with its running about and clambering all over everything, snapping at Hagrid's fingers whenever he tried to grab hold of it.

It was an ugly dragon, too – leathery and black, resembling a crumpled umbrella, with ginormous spiny wings that went horribly with its skinny jet body, and its bulging orange eyes looked extremely sinister in its face, with the long snout with wide nostrils and the stubs of horns on its head. It also tended to release smoke from its mouth, as if already trying to spit fire.

"Isn't he _beautiful_?"

"Er... no, not really," Seamus said with a shake of his head.

"Hagrid, you can't keep it," Dean said, placing his hand on the half-giant's elbow and earning himself a glare.

"He's just a baby! I can't jus' let it go!"

"Hagrid, d'you know how fast they grow?" Harry asked. "We've read up on them; give it two or three weeks, it'll be half the size of your house, and then where would you keep it?"

The groundskeeper's shoulders slumped and he released a big, weary sigh.

"I know, Harry. I know I can't keep him forever, but I can't jus' dump him, either. He knows I'm his mummy already."

"Look, we have an idea," Ron said, stepping next to Dean. "My brother Charlie – you remember him, he talks about you all the time – he's in Romania, working with dragons. Charlie can take care of him at the reserve. How about it, Hagrid? You want me to write to him?"

Hagrid held out for another three days before finally acquiescing with them that it was a better idea. By that time, the dragon (named Norbert, of all things) had seen fit to grow almost two times its initial size, and was showing no indication of becoming less wild then he'd been at hatching, to the point that Hagrid was starting to neglect his gamekeeping duties. Even if Harry and his Marauders had wanted to help (which they hadn't, and even if they'd originally wanted, the information about the dragon species had swiftly changed their minds), there was simply no time – with their exams coming up in the beginning of June, and with fourteen subjects to study for, plus their sports activities and other clubs and study groups, they barely had enough time for the occasional prank, let alone tending to a baby dragon.

Cybèle brought them Charlie's response three days later; he wrote to tell them that some friends of his had been planning to visit, and that he'd spoken with them about moving their trip to next week in order to pick up the dragon and take it with them. It meant that they would have to get Norbert to the Astronomy Tower at midnight on Saturday of next week, but considering everything else, that wasn't too bad. At least the thing couldn't grow to be so large they'd not be able to carry it quietly all that way.

That settled, they all breathed a silent sigh of relief, before agreeing that this was by far the most exciting development of the school year, including the incident with the Troll – after all, they'd gotten caught on that one, and they had no intention of getting caught on this.

* * *

How Slughorn had managed to find the single most displeasurable task for the detention was beyond Evan, but he wasn't about to complain, primarily because to _him_ , who'd spent his earliest childhood playing with Bobotuber Pus and Flobberworm Mucus, having to rake the Thestral Paddocks and then process Thestral dung for potions ingredients was rather fun (even with the smell of it, which was _horrendous_ , because Thestrals apparently ate raw meat); for Malfoy, on the other hand, this seemed to be hell, not only because of the ick factor, but also because he was thoroughly unnerved by the invisible creatures.

Hagrid had introduced them to the Thestrals, and though it was somewhat strange to have to work around invisible animals, Evan had decided that he liked them. The foals often sniffed at him and nipped his hair or fingers, and the adults seemed very nice in keeping away while he was raking their muck. The sound of their wings and the air currents they produced when moving them seemed to put Malfoy very much on edge, making him look almost pitiable by the end of the session – Slughorn had ordered them to produce one box each of Powdered Thestral Excrement, and the process of drying and crushing the dung was a somewhat lengthy one.

So, one sunny Saturday mid-April, Evan and Malfoy were working the crushing machine near the edge of the Forbidden Forest (since the whole process was rather stinky, and other people wandering around the equipment building – including Quidditch players, Herbology enthusiasts, students who took Care for Magical Creatures and anyone in-between – refused to tolerate it on account of two firsties doing detention, even if it was processing potion ingredients for Sluggy) when Potter and his Junior Marauders descended from the castle and rather surreptitiously snuck into Hagrid's cottage.

Evan nudged Malfoy to point out what was going on, and the blonde boy wiped at the sweat on his forehead distractedly with the sleeve of Evan's old shirt – after the first time, he'd actually been willing to accept Evan's Muggle clothing for exactly such disgusting tasks, and was now wearing sweat-pants and a tee shirt with the print of _DuckTales_ characters on it (and seeing _Draco Malfoy_ of all people in such clothing was entertainment to last Evan months).

"There's been smoke coming out of the hut for days now," Evan noted, leaning against the crushing machine to consider the implications.

"Yeah, and the last time we were here, the curtains were drawn, too," Malfoy agreed, putting down the shovel. "Come on, Snape; let's have a little break."

So, leaving their detention (which Hagrid was supposed to supervise, though he'd not done it since he'd shown them how to work the machinery), the two Slytherins snuck up to the wooden hut and tried to peer through the windows.

"Can you see anything?" Evan hissed, dropping down from the pile of logs once he'd determined that his window was thoroughly covered.

"Yeah," Malfoy replied just as quietly, scooting to the side a little as Evan elbowed him in order to see for himself, too. "Is that a _dragon_?"

Squinting, Evan peered into the darkened interior of the hut, and found himself shocked to realise that, yes, there was indeed a baby dragon running around inside.

"What the hell?" he breathed out, watching the bizarre sort of dance the half-giant was performing in his attempts to catch the dragon, which was bounding around the room this way and that. "That's illega– ooof."

Stumbling in his attempts to catch his balance, Evan nearly fell down; Malfoy had pulled him away and was now tugging him back towards their abandoned tasks. Deciding the other boy had most likely seen something, Evan found his footing and picked up the pace, so that by the time the door to Hagrid's hut opened and Potter peeked out, Evan and Malfoy were hidden behind the crushing machine, out of his direct line of sight.

"I think they didn't see us," Evan said through gulps of air; unlike Malfoy, he wasn't used to this kind of exertion.

"They're taking it somewhere tonight; there was an open crate with a _plushy_ inside."

"What're you thinking? Catch them in the act?"

Malfoy eyed him thoughtfully, before cocking his head.

"You up for it?"

"Get them caught with an illegal dragon? You bet I am; that's an expellable offense."

They waited until Potter and his cronies left before sneaking back to the hut, to spy on Hagrid a little more and see if they could figure out when the Gryffindor firsties would be taking it away. The half-giant looked like he was crying, holding the wiggling dragon tightly to his chest and petting it, of all things, though the dragon looked seconds away from spitting fire to get away.

"Well, he's definitely getting rid of it tonight," Evan murmured, ducking down to be eye-level with Malfoy. "Most likely they've contacted Charlie Weasley, he works with dragons."

"How do you even know that?" Malfoy asked, incredulous.

"I may think the Weasel is a prat, but not all Weasleys are actually bad," Evan pointed out. "The twins work at my parents' store all summer, and Ginny Weasley's a good friend. They talk about their brother," he explained with a shrug as the two of them began their walk back to the school; there was just enough time to grab a shower to get rid of the smell before dinner. "Anyway, that's what I'd do if I wanted to get rid of a dragon."

"So, we stake out the hut until they show up?"

"Best chance we'd have," Evan agreed.

The snag in their plan came in the form of Hermione, who plopped herself down between Evan and Malfoy at dinner like it was the most normal thing in the world and turned her glare on him.

"What is this I hear about you planning to sneak out tonight?"

"Wha... who told you?" he demanded to know, glaring at her.

"Evan, give me some credit," she demanded. "I'm a Ravenclaw, but I'm not that naïve." Evan took that to mean that Malfoy had told either his two cronies or Parkinson (because of course he would have), and that she'd overheard them discussing it. Wonderful. "Now, tell me."

"Get the hell away from me, Granger," Malfoy growled, elbowing her until she was forced to almost sit in Evan's lap to avoid him. "Go back to your table and leave us the hell alone."

"Is this your idea, Malfoy?" she demanded to know, huffing at his manhandling and deciding to fight fire with fire (and wasn't that an amusing sight, to see Malfoy having an elbow fight with Hermione). "Is this revenge for what Evan had done to you? Getting him into trouble?"

"We're getting _Potterprat_ into trouble," Evan corrected her. "And Malfoy, for Merlin's sake, scoot over, before you knock down half the food off the table."

"For _her_?"

"And what's wrong with me?" Hermione demanded to know.

"You're Mu– Muggle-born, and the very sight of you is making me want to vomit."

For a moment, Evan thought Hermione would burst into tears, before she seemed to rally and instead cross her arms over her chest.

"Well, since _your_ smell is making half the _Great Hall_ want to vomit, I can't say I care much for what you think of me," she told him primly, and Malfoy grew red in the face as the surrounding Slytherins began laughing and sniggering at him. Meanwhile, Hermione turned her back to him pointedly and returned her unpleasant focus on Evan.

"What are you planning, then?"

Evan eyed the Slytherins around him, then Hermione's set expression, before sighing and getting to his feet. Dragging her to a corner where they'd not be heard, he explained what he and Malfoy had witnessed, and what their plan for the evening was.

"So, last month you curse him into the hospital wing, and now you're all chummy?" she asked dubiously.

"No, of course not; it's just for this one thing. And, as I told him, if he doesn't insult my mother, then I'm fine with him. He's a Slytherin," he explained, hoping Hermione would understand what he meant by that, though was forced to accept that he was asking too much of her with it, and so explained further. "He has a grudge about it, obviously, and I _really_ don't like him, but if we have a common goal, then we can work together to achieve it. That's why we're Slytherins."

Hermione frowned, observing him in silence for a while, and Evan returned her look with his own, waiting for her reaction; when it came, it was in the form of her putting her hand into her robes pocket and pulling out a piece of parchment, and Evan's shoulders drooped in resignation.

He accepted the _Defer_ note in silence and clenched it in his hand.

"Why?"

"Because it's too dangerous to mess about with a dragon, and you're already in trouble for what happened with Malfoy. Plus, you may trust that he's a Slytherin, but I don't. So, I want you to stay in your room tonight and not go snooping after Harry."

"Fine," he accepted, rueing the day he'd thought those notes would be a good birthday present. "But you're going to sit with me and be my human shield against Malfoy, clear?"

"Yeah, yeah," she agreed, finally cracking a smile and joining him in the little trek back to the Slytherin table. "And tomorrow, I'll get the whole story out of Harry; it's bound to be a good one. A dragon. Imagine that!"

Evan only groaned in response.

* * *

Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback was packed up in his crate when Harry and Dean came to pick it up, hiding under the Invisibility Cloak. It had been decided that, as the two most athletic Marauders, they'd be the ones carrying the crate up to the Astronomy Tower, while Ron and Seamus were tasked with keeping watch; though they'd not seen who it was that had been spying on them earlier today, Harry had a strong hunch that it was either Snape or Malfoy, or possibly both – after all, that weird crushing machine that looked remarkably like a very big mortar and pestle had been set up not too far from Hagrid's hut, along with that stinky Thestral dung, so who else would it have been?

"He's got lots o' rats an' some brandy fer the journey. An' I've packed his teddy bear in case he gets lonely."

They made Hagrid say good-bye to the dragon in the hut, and were sure to vanish under the Invisibility Cloak with the crate between them before even opening the door. The dragon seemed to be busy tearing up that teddy bear. Nudging Dean to go out, Harry tried to be as silent as possible so that Hagrid wouldn't notice them leave (he was crying again, and Harry really wasn't sure how to comfort the half-giant – he personally was thoroughly looking forward to the dragon being _gone_ ).

They passed Ron at the entrance right where they'd agreed he would be, and he shook his head at them when Harry peeked out from under the Invisibility Cloak; so, nothing yet. Harry was expecting at least Peeves, if not the Slytherins or Fred and George (hm, did animals show up on the Marauder's Map? He'd have to ask Remus that, too).

It took them forever to get the crate all the way up; though they both used the Levitation Charm, it was hard to control the crate's movements and keep it hidden under the Cloak, considering the weight of that thing and the fact that the dragon didn't like being banged around in the big box and was fighting them any way it could. Still, they made it in time, with Seamus peeking out from what secret passageways they'd discovered over the year that were on their way (they'd planned their route so that they'd have that coverage; it had saved their hides back during their first foray into night-time sneaking, after all) to let them know that so far, there was nothing suspicious going on.

They made it to the top of the Astronomy Tower with five minutes to spare, and sat on the crate to keep it from banging about quite as much while they waited for Charlie's friends to arrive.

"I really thought someone would be out looking for us," Dean noted, peering into the dark distance; with so few clouds in the sky, the near-full moon was shining down from the sky, and when he peered out, Harry could see the grassy lawns of the school grounds as far as to the Forbidden Forest. He spared a thought to Remus and how he was preparing for the full moon.

Charlie's friends were very much on time, flying in on brooms from the darkness. A cheery lot, they showed Harry and Dean the harness they'd rigged up for Norbert, and traded jokes with the first-years while they loaded the dragon into it. They shook hands and flew off into the darkness, and Harry leaned against the parapets to watch them shrink into the distance.

When they disappeared, Harry sighed in relief and even a little tiredness, and began turning to grab his Invisibility Cloak and get to bed; before he fully turned, though, his eyes fell to the edge of the Forbidden Forest, catching movement. Frowning, Harry leaned forward and tried to see if there really was someone there.

"What're you looking at?"

"There – no, there – see? See that?"

"See what?"

Growling under his breath, Harry pointed to the moving figure, and Dean breathed out a silent 'oh'.

"What the heck is someone doing in the Forbidden Forest this time of night?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out," Harry answered, sneakers squeaking as he spun on his feet. "Take the Cloak and get the others; I'll be back in a tick!"

"Harry, no! Wait for us!"

"No time!"

" _Harry!_ "

But he wasn't paying any attention to it, because his head was filled with more important things, like wondering whether this was Regulus again, threatening Quirrell, and if it was tied to the Philosopher's Stone. His thoughts, focused as they were on the shadowy figure, jumped to the dream he'd had days before, a chill passing down his spine at it. It had only been a dream, after all; nothing true in it at all.

And yet.

Paying no attention to the noise he was making, Harry sprinted down the many flights of stairs, past the Great Hall and onto the courtyard, where he barely took the moments to orient himself before racing to the Forest.

He stopped once he was past the treeline, the waxing moon reminding him of all the warnings he'd heard of the Forbidden Forest. Pulling his wand out, he cast a soft _Lumos_ and tried to find tracks of the figure who'd walked in; even though it was dark, this part of the forest floor was still visible enough that he could search out broken twigs and disturbed grass.

The trail, once he found it, led him a little deeper into the Forest, and he slowed down considerably in order to be able to follow it, relying heavily on his hearing as well to possibly catch anything suspicious – like the sound of breaking twigs just behind him.

Whirling on the spot, adrenalin flooding his system, Harry lifted his wand high up, widening his stance and settling a little lower to the ground, ready for a fight against the cloaked figure. In response, his stalker yelped and fell back, and after a moment of confusion, Harry realised that it wasn't an adult at all, but rather a blond-haired boy his age – Draco Malfoy.

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?" Harry hissed at him, marching over and tugging him to his feet. "You're going to get us caught!"

"What are _you_ doing in the Forest?" Malfoy shot back. "And where's the dragon?"

"What dragon?" Harry asked, lifting his eyebrow in challenge. In response, Malfoy's face darkened.

"You know damn well what dragon I'm talking about. Are you getting rid of the dragon?"

"I don't know why you're here, Malfoy, I can't pretend to know what goes on in little minds of Pure-blood arseholes, but _I_ am trying to catch a thief. D'you see a dragon somewhere around here?"

"What thief?"

"The one who stole my socks," Harry snapped quietly at him. "Get back to the castle, would you?"

"As if I would; I'm coming with you."

"To do what? Tattle on me? It's a midnight jaunt in the forest, Malfoy, not smuggling a dragon out of the castle."

Rolling his eyes at Malfoy's 'aha, gotcha' expression, Harry continued town the trail, and after a moment, Malfoy seemed to decide that he was, indeed, going to join him, because his _Lumos_ joined Harry's. With so much light, it was no wonder they soon spotted the silvery glint of a liquid on the nearby trees.

"What's that?" Malfoy whispered as Harry touched the liquid with his finger and brought it closer to his face.

"It smells like blood." Ice suffused his veins, and he clenched his teeth against the fear creeping into him. "Unicorn blood."

"An injured unicorn? Isn't that giant half-wit supposed to be the gamekeeper? What the hell is he being paid to do?"

"He can't very well be watching the entire Forest," Harry snapped back, rubbing his fingers against his trouser leg to wipe off the blood. He felt tainted just having it on his fingers, and any thought of catching the cloaked figure went out of his head at the thought of the injured unicorn. They needed to find it. "Come on; the sooner we find it, the sooner we can get it to Hagrid for help."

"Wait, you don't think that _we're_ supposed to do anything about this, do you?!"

"No, I just think we should wander the Forest simply for kicks and ignore any injured unicorns."

"Oh, good. In that case, I'm out of here."

Growling in anger, Harry got a fistful of Malfoy's robes and tugged him forward with himself. "You wanted to spy on me? Well, here's your chance, Malfoy. Let's see how you like it."

"Let – me – go!"

And so Harry did, right into a root protruding from the ground. Malfoy tripped and fell back with an 'oof'.

"You done now?" he asked the other boy. "Merlin, I'd known Slytherins were cowards, but I didn't think they would be pathetic about it! You're worse than Snape!"

"You take that back!"

"Or what? You're going to hex me? Here, now?" Huffing, Harry stepped over the other boy, in search of more unicorn blood. It wasn't hard to spot, either, because it shined in the meagre light. "Are you coming or not, McSnot?"

"Oh, shut up, Scarface," Malfoy growled but scrambled to his feet to walk shoulder to shoulder with Harry.

In the next ten minutes, they managed to wander even deeper into the forest, but also start seeing the blood with barely any light, that was how much of it there was. All the while, Harry felt more and more on edge, to the point where his whole body began tingling, and even his scar prickled; it felt like waiting for the Quidditch match to start, only he had no clue when the waiting might end, leaving him almost jittery in suspense.

When the finally _did_ find the unicorn, he broke into a sprint in order to get to it faster, dropping to his knees right in front of it. The unicorn seemed to have fallen down onto the forest floor, and there was an enormous gash straight down and half-way through its neck, the silver blood pooling slowly and soaking into its fur.

It was obviously dead.

Malfoy gagged from somewhere behind him, and Harry felt about the same way. The _wrongness_ of the sight was almost overwhelming, the utter _evil_ of someone having killed this pure creature. Stumbling back to his feet, Harry moved away, looking up into the trees in search of what might have done this. Sirius had mentioned him, Harry's dad and Remus running into a unicorn only once, and they'd managed to steer the werewolf away from it, because, in Sirius' words, 'killing unicorns was barely forgivable for senseless creatures, let alone wizards in any shape or form'.

Harry hoped this creature had been killed by such a senseless being, but the terrible fear in the pit of his gut, the one that was calling up his dream, was telling him that he was wrong.

"If you're out there," he yelled out, clenching his fists at his sides, "I'm going to get you, and I'm going to make you pay for what you've done to it!"

"Potter," Malfoy hissed, tugging on his arm so sharply Harry almost fell down, and was most certainly shocked out of his anger, "shut the hell up, would you?"

Closing his mouth, Harry listened to the sounds of the Forest, and to the noise that seemed to be gradually coming closer. Turning to face it, both boys lifted their wands and waited, tension holding them rigid.

So it was definitely a relief to see Hagrid struggling through the trees.

"Harry? What're yeh doin' here this time 'a night? Is Norbert–"

"Hagrid!" Harry exclaimed in relief, rushing to the half-giant. "Someone's killed a unicorn!"

Hagrid's beady eyes shifted from Harry to Malfoy and then to the carcass behind them, and his whole visage darkened.

"Come with me, both of yeh. I'm takin' yeh back to Hogwarts."

* * *

Dropping into the chair at their designated table, Hermione sighed, running her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tie it all back. Talking to Harry had been a chore all right – figuring out ways of saying things without actually saying anything was proving to be more than a little draining; no matter how much she tried to follow her friend's advice regarding such behaviour, deception rarely came naturally to her, especially such deception that wasn't simply about concealing important things, but rather concealing the concealment instead.

It was a good thing, at least, that Harry didn't seem to suspect her in the least, because she thought a Slytherin would have cottoned on to what she was doing in a matter of minutes.

"So? What did you find out from Potter?" Evan asked her.

"You were right about the dragon; they got rid of it last night, gave it to Ronald's brother's friends. Apparently, there was someone sneaking into the forest, and so Harry went after them, which was how he found the dead unicorn. Malfoy was spying on him; you weren't." That last part was said more as a question than a statement, but by the annoyed look Evan was giving her, he really hadn't gone out last night.

"I told you, I waited for Malfoy to return and questioned him about it," he replied. "He looked horrible, too, pale as a ghost and completely terrified. I mean, that he was willing to tell me even after I'd blown him off yesterday, he must have gotten utterly shaken up by the whole thing. Seeing a dead unicorn..."

"I read about them, of course," Hermione agreed. "In _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ , it's said that unicorns are considered the purest creatures in the world, and the only ones who'd conceivably harm one would be creatures lacking sentience."

"Or someone who doesn't care about their soul," Evan finished for her.

"You think this was deliberate?"

"I think that this not being a mauling is more indicative of a targeted kill than a natural attack. That is, if Malfoy was right in what he told me about the wound."

"You know, that sort of sounds familiar to me. The type of injury, I mean."

"Yeah? What of?"

Frowning, Hermione tried to remember why it all sounded so familiar, but it wasn't coming to her. That itch of understanding was in the back of her head, but she just couldn't reach it.

"I don't know. What would it mean, though? If someone purposely killed a unicorn?"

"Well, unicorn parts are very valuable magical objects," Evan suggested. "Tail hair, for instance, is used in wandmaking, though it has to be either willingly given or collected after shedding to work properly, same as phoenix feathers. The horn is used in potion-making, as well as blood, though the blood is only for very Dark potions. I mean, to even think of ingesting unicorn blood is vile, even if it _were_ to be given freely by the creature."

"Oh, that's it!" Hermione exclaimed, the switch flipping in her mind at his words. "That's where I'd seen it before!"

"What, the wound?"

"Yes, on one of the school trips, they took us to a farm, and there was a slaughterhouse there. Slitting the throat below the chin is how they drain the cows of blood." The thing still made her stomach a little queasy when she thought of it, actually. On Evan, though, her words seemed to make an even bigger impact, because his complexion became ashen.

"That is..." He ended the sentence with a shudder.

"What is?"

"Killing a unicorn for its blood... unicorn blood can keep one alive even if they were supposed to die within seconds, but the damage that does to the drinker, to their soul, especially if it's forcibly taken... it's monstrous."

Dread pooled in Hermione's stomach at the thought.

"But then, if whoever that was that Harry saw was in the forest to kill the unicorn for its blood... who'd do such a thing?"

"Anyone who does not value life. Evil people."

"Like Voldemort?"

"Yeah; from what I know, he was evil enough to possibly do something like that," Evan confirmed. "I don't know, maybe some of the Death Eaters still out there? Or someone completely new."

"Not a student, though. You know, the Philosopher's Stone can also extend life," she noted, information connecting in her mind to paint a disgusting picture. "What if, whoever's trying to steal the Stone, is also the one who killed the unicorn?"

"Maybe," her friend allowed. "Still, though; living forever is one thing, but unicorn blood can't give you immortality."

"Well, Harry didn't mention if they suspect anyone for that, but he did mention in passing that there's a lot of protections on the Stone. Apparently, he'd found out from Hagrid that most of the House Heads had made their own protection, as well as Professor Dumbledore himself and Professor Quirrell."

"If you can call _that_ a professor," Evan muttered with a roll of his eyes; Quirrell was by far the worst teacher they had this year, and Hermione was half-way hoping that the whole talk of the position being cursed was true, just to get someone better for DADA next year. "Still, though, if Dumbledore himself set up the protection, then the Stone's safe. He's one of the most powerful wizards living. Hey, one thing I'm not sure on – did Potter mention how Hagrid had gotten the egg in the first place? It's not like they grow on trees around here."

"Yeah, he said Hagrid had won it in a game of cards in Hogsmeade."

"What, really?"

"I know, it sounded suspicious to me, too," Hermione agreed. "Who'd be carrying around a dragon egg to lose on a card game? Or bet a dragon egg in the first place? Aren't they valuable?"

"Yeah. Also, illegal. Handing it off in a card game to some half-giant you've never met before, that's just asking for the AO to start looking into you."

"Unless they knew Hagrid," Hermione suggested. "Harry said it took them a while to convince Hagrid to part with it, so he obviously wanted to keep it. If the person knew about it, then it wouldn't be risky at all. I mean, how many half-giants work near Hogwarts?"

"Ok, but why? What would be the point of giving him a dragon egg?"

The bushy-haired Ravenclaw shrugged. "You want me to start throwing out ideas until something sticks?"

"Might as well; that's how we figured it out the last time."

"Well, then. Distracting him from something?"

"Sure, our detention," Evan agreed, wrinkling his nose; thankfully, the washing service could get rid of the smell, though it was always pretty bad.

"Erm... buttering him up for something?"

"He doesn't have much pull around here, though."

"Getting information?"

Evan's face turned thoughtful at that. "That might be it; playing cards goes with drinking, and I imagine he's the chatty drunk type. Get him something he's always wanted, and I could see him talking about things he shouldn't."

"Like what?"

"The Cerberus? I mean, even supposing that is Kettleburn's defence, I'd expect him to know how to handle it. There's no way Kettleburn could climb all the way up to the third floor to feed the creature every single day, not in a wheelchair."

"You know, that makes sense," Hermione agreed. "We know someone's been trying to get past the Cerberus since at least Hallowe'en. Maybe that was it. But then, what about Harry hearing female footsteps going in that direction?"

"Red herring," Evan dismissed. "There's always at least one in these sorts of things."

"What are we, Norville and Dashiell?"

"What? No!" Evan exclaimed, looking half-way scandalised. "If I'm anyone, I'd be Sherbrand. _You_ can be Dashiell all you like."

"Well, _I'm_ certainly not going to be _Dashiell Barrowman_ ," Hermione retorted with an incredulous look. "I'm not nearly that clumsy, or that insufferable. And _don't_... don't say it," she warned pre-emptively the moment Evan opened his mouth. "If you're Sherbrand, then I'm Persephone, and that's final."

"I saw what you did there," Evan said with a pointed look (apparently, he also didn't like being compared to Norville Flosslax's sidekick in Lassiter's books). "But I agree; you're a girl, so you should be Persephone."

"That was a very obvious backhanded compliment," she pointed out, somewhat prissily, to which Evan shrugged (not her intended reaction).

"Hey, I like Persephone; she's at least smart enough not to fall for Norville's charms, and she does help out from time to time."

"She's _girly_."

"Well, we can't all aspire to your high standard. Besides, you were the one who said it first."

" _I_ was making a point about your 'red herring' comment, Evan, not trying to assign us characters from a book series!"

"Whatever you say," he agreed blithely, sniggering in that barely audible way of his when she huffed and smacked his shoulder lightly in retaliation, and Hermione, begrudgingly, felt herself smile at him.

As insufferable as he was, she wouldn't trade him for anything.

* * *

Harry saw Regulus again two days after the unicorn incident. Hagrid had, of course, promised to inform Dumbledore about it, and to keep Harry and Malfoy's presence in the Forbidden Forest to himself; considering Harry had been there because he'd been cleaning up one of Hagrid's messes, that had only seemed fair (even if it would have been nice to get Malfoy into trouble, especially since the blond snot had been there to get _Harry_ into trouble first).

This time, Regulus approached the school in full view of everyone, including Harry and his group. He offered a perfunctory nod, which Harry returned with a slight smile – doubts or no, Regulus was still part of his extended family, someone he called Uncle Reg at home, and it would have seemed far too suspicious if he hadn't greeted the man. Harry, having just finished Quidditch training, was too far away to hear what Regulus was saying when he stopped one of the upper-year students, but it seemed to be directions, at least by the gestures the Ravenclaw student was using in her explanation.

Harry's decision to follow the man around was mostly useless in the end, as by the time he reached the school, Regulus was nowhere in sight, and the Ravenclaw girl he'd asked for directions was lost in the throng of people going to the Great Hall for breakfast.

Well, it was either up or down, and the only thing downstairs were the dungeons, where they had Potions Class and where the Slytherin Quarters were. Harry chose to go up.

He ended up running into Fred and George on the second floor, just as they were emerging from behind a tapestry. They were still dressed in their Quidditch gear (though why they hadn't changed with everyone else after the training was beyond Harry).

"Hey, guys," he called out, sliding on the stone floor to stop before them, "I need to ask you something."

"Oh, if it isn't Ickle Harrykins," one of them said with a smirk.

"How can us two poor beggars be of assistance to the great Boy-Who-Lived?" the other one asked, sporting exactly the same smirk as his twin. Harry rolled his eyes.

"I'd play along, honest, but I'm in a little hurry. Have you, perhaps, seen a wizard walking around, black hair, tall, sort of good-looking?"

The twins exchanged looks, and one of them (Harry thought it might be Fred) moved to drape his arm across Harry's shoulders.

"Would we be wrong in assuming you know the name of the wizard, too?"

"Er... yeah, it's Regulus Black. He's my sort-of uncle, and I'm sure I saw him get into the school, but when I came to say 'hi', he was already gone."

"And so you've come to ask for our help," Fred surmised, walking Harry towards the main staircase. "So, if we help you find him, does that mean you'll help us with something?"

"What do you need?" Harry asked, warning bells ringing in his mind.

"Oh, just a little thing, really. A small collaboration between us and the illustrious Potter gang on a spectacular prank that'll get us the House Cup."

"Uh-huh. So it's something you can't pull off by yourselves?"

"We're not above partnering with competition to achieve a common goal," Fred answered with a shrug, just as George ran up to join them.

"So, what do you say, Harry?"

"Fine, but I reserve the right to veto anything that might get me and mine into trouble," he said, trying to appear as stern as he could. Fred and George exchanged looks that were part of their usual silent communication, before George nodded.

"All right; as it happens, we _did_ see the bloke you're looking for, and we're pretty sure he was going to the fourth floor, eastern wing."

"Oh, you are, are you?" Harry retorted, narrowing his eyes at them, before putting a cheery smile on his face. "Thanks, guys. Have your people call my people about the arrangement, and I'll see what I can do about it."

(Of course, having Lee Jordan approach Seamus of all people for a sit-down was not exactly what Harry had in mind when using that phrase, but then he should have remembered that those two had a weird sense of humour).

He sprinted to the fourth floor and down the corridor towards the eastern part of the castle, thinking as he went that this was as good a confirmation as any that those two did, in fact, have the Marauder's Map – the directions were too precise for them to have simply passed him by, they'd asked for his name, and Fred had effectively prevented Harry from seeing what George was doing for maybe a minute, which would have been just enough time to ask the Map to show them Regulus' whereabouts. After this, he thought it a safe bet to say that he'd have to deal with them to get the Map.

But that was a think for another time; the more immediate concern was Regulus, who was, indeed, where the twins had said he'd be. Harry cast the _Quietum Solum_ charm on his shoes to keep from giving himself away and snuck from alcove to alcove until he was close enough to actually observe his pseudo-uncle.

Regulus was standing in front of what looked suspiciously like the stone gargoyle to Dumbledore's office (though how that was possible, when the office had been on the sixth floor that one time Harry had gone to meet Sirius there, he had no clue), deep in conversation with someone wearing dark robes.

Pushing his glasses up, Harry tried to find an angle from which Regulus wasn't obstructing his view, and in the end almost had to walk out of the alcove to properly see, but when he did, things clicked startlingly fast in his mind – now that he'd found a good angle, he could tell that not only was the other man wearing dark clothes, he was almost completely covered in black, from his hair to his robes and his boots. But it was the eyes, the unsettlingly black eyes that he'd seen enough to be weary of, that confirmed his suspicion as to the identity of Seamus' man in black – it was Severus Snape, the Slimysnake's father.

* * *

 **A/N:** The 'Defer' slips that Hermione uses to make Evan stay in his dorm are introduced back in chapter 10, and they were bound to come into play at some point or another, after all. _DuckTales_ was a Disney animated series that ran from 1987 to 1990, focusing on Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck's three nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie). I actually remember watching the movie that accompanied it when I was very young, and loving it (and, it does have magic and witching characters, primarily in the form of Magica De Spell, which I think would definitely appeal to a wizarding child, if only to be able to spot what all is wrong with it compared to HP magic).

This is one of those cases where events not directly in contact with those who are changed from canon happen in exactly the same way they did initially (Quirrell giving Hagrid the dragon egg), but the resolution ends up being somewhat different (which is the best kind of AU in my opinion). In this case, the difference lies primarily in that Harry and Ron not only have one more person to help out, but they've also learned to approach such situations differently - with less running headlong into it, and a bit more strategic thinking. This is mostly due to the minute difference in Ron's character, because, as I tried to make it previously understood, him being friends with Harry since the cradle has by and large stopped him from hanging his inferiority complex issues on their friendship, which has made room for his more strategic thinking to properly evolve. In my opinion, anyone _that_ good in chess as Ron was described _must_ be a good strategist given the skills necessary for chess winning, and I always felt sad that this was mostly swept under the rug after the very first book, after the gimmick had played itself out and Ron had become the comic relief in the movies (which I think had, in fact, unfavorably affected his later book development). Ron's more strategic mind here is also propped by Harry's genuine appreciation for such thinking, and thus encouragement Ron gets for expressing it. This, coupled with a Harry who knows far more about the wizarding world, and with a more self-servingly pragmatic ally like Seamus instead of Hermione (with Dean to offer additional support), led to the events differing as they did (Ron not getting bitten, for one thing). Having four instead of two people involved and Malfoy not having information as precise as he did in canon (since Ron didn't get bitten, Malfoy had no chance to find Charlie's letter and thus learn any details beyond 'it's happening tonight') also changed the timing (e.g. he got overheard by Hermione here instead of Neville, which removed the latter from the equation, and him having to track Harry and co. from Hagrid's hut meant he did not cross paths with McGonagall), and thus, no detention...

...For this, at least. No worries, the trip to the Forbidden Forest is still on the books for next chapter; there is, after all, a plot hole to be filled right there, with how utterly irresponsible McGonagall could have been to send a bunch of eleven-year-olds in the middle of the night into a forest teeming with who knew what sort of deadly things. Seriously, if that had been my child, I'd have sued the school's ass and pulled them out post haste, because that right there is premeditated child endangerment, plain and simple (part of this project, for me, was about finding as many plot holes and trying to explain them logically in-universe, as best I could. I can't say it's been easy by any stretch of the imagination).


	20. Ch 19: The Spectres of the Past

**Chapter 19: The Spectres of the Past**

"You're sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. That's Snape's father."

"And he was talking to Regulus?"

"Yup. There was some sort of privacy spell around them that I couldn't hear through."

"Sounds more than suspicious."

Tucked away in their dorm, the four Junior Marauders were discussing Harry's latest discovery – the fact that they'd finally been able to identify Seamus' man in black. Harry had only stayed long enough to figure out that he couldn't eavesdrop, before he'd run back to get the others and share the news.

"Was Snape Senior ever accused of being a Death Eater?" Seamus asked.

Trying to remember what Sirius had mentioned, Harry grimaced. "I don't... maybe. Sirius _really_ hates him, and from what I've seen, he has good cause, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was."

"But Mrs Snape is Muggle-born, isn't she?"

"Yeah. Doesn't have to mean anything, though," Harry said with a shrug. "I mean, he's a Slytherin; he might have married her for political gain – she's famous, after all." It was an unpleasant thought, but Harry couldn't quite figure out why in the world someone as nice as Lily Snape would have _wanted_ to marry someone as horrible and disgusting as her husband. "In any case, I know for sure that he wasn't fighting with Dad and Mum during the War, or he'd have been in that photograph of everyone in my scrapbook, the one at the very back, and no one's ever mentioned him in any of the stories, either."

"So, what's our thinking, then?" Dean asked. "Snape's father and Regulus Black are working together to get to the Stone?"

"Seems like it," Harry confirmed.

"Should we tell someone?" Seamus suggested. "Dumbledore, at least."

"No; Snape's father is here too often for it to be a coincidence, he must have gotten permission from Dumbledore, and Regulus is one of the school's governors. Unless we have proof, there's no way we can convince them to believe us."

"Not even your guardian?"

"If it was anyone else but Regulus, I'm sure he'd believe us."

"But not about his own brother," Dean finished. "Yeah, I don't think I'd believe something like that about my brothers, either. So, what else can we do?"

"Keep our eyes and ears open, and try to get proof. So long as they can't get past Fluffy, the Stone is safe, and I don't think Quirrell's cracked yet, either. Oh, and keep an eye on Snape, too. He might be in on it with his old man."

* * *

Evan didn't consider himself to be a suspicious person by nature; rather, he'd been taught to question everything even when there seemed little reason for it. However, that didn't mean that he wasn't, as Hermione liked to say, _nosey_. Curiosity was a trait he shared with his mother, and so he'd never truly been discouraged from it (this had led to a few extremely embarrassing moments in his life, but then he suspected that most people stumbled on their parents doing the nasty at least once in their existence).

Which was most likely why, when he heard whimpers coming out of the DADA classroom as he was walking up to the Ravenclaw Tower (Hermione had said that the riddle to enter the Ravenclaw Quarters was quite good today, and he wanted to try it out on his own) some weeks after the whole dragon business, he stopped and tried to peer into the classroom and see what was going on.

Quirrell's voice was audible, though it sounded pathetically weak, and the man himself was hidden by the barely open door.

"No, no, not again, _please_..."

Frowning, Evan drew closer, intent on walking in to see what in the world was going on; this sounded suspiciously like someone was hurting the man.

"All right – all right –"

Then the stuttering professor was bursting through the door, hands tucking his turban almost frantically on his head and looking on the verge of a crying spell, and Evan had to stumble back to not get walked right into. To his surprise, Quirrell didn't even seem to be aware he'd almost ploughed right into a student. Eying the man, then the classroom door, Evan debated momentarily on whether to follow after him or try and see who it was that had put the man in this situation.

In the end, he only peeked into the classroom momentarily, to establish whether someone else was also there; the door to Quirrell's office was ajar, the classroom vacant of any living things, and so quickly drawing the conclusion that whoever had been here had gone out the other way, he instead picked up his pace and ran after the stuttering man, catching up with him almost two flights of stairs lower.

"Professor Quirrell!"

Quirrell almost stumbled down the last few stairs and turned towards Evan; he was white as chalk, and looked _awful_ , really; it hadn't been so visible from the back row during class, or maybe he was simply too bored with that class to pay much attention, but the state of the man caught Evan off guard.

"Are you all right, sir?"

"Y-yes, Mr S-Snape, of-of course I am."

"It's just..." Doing a quick shuffle in his head, Evan decided not to mention what he'd witnessed and chose another path instead. "No offense, sir, but you look bloody awful. Maybe you should go see Madam Pomfrey? I'm sure she'd have something to make you feel better."

"I-I-I only have a c-cold, it's n-nothing."

 _Yeah, that totally sounded convincing_ , Evan thought, barely containing himself from rolling his eyes.

"Th-thank you f-for your c-concern, but I'll be f-fine."

"Are you sure? Because you do know that the DADA position is said to have been cursed by You-Know-Who? I just don't want anything bad to happen to you."

Quirrell winced and shook his head.

"N-nonsense, Mr S-Snape; n-nothing will h-happen to me. N-now, if you'll ex-excuse me."

With that, Quirrell turned around and hurried down the stairs, leaving Evan to stare after him, thinking, as he did so, that the man had seemed in quite a big of a hurry.

He debated on the whole event as he veered back towards the Ravenclaw Tower, and his moment of inattention almost cost him a broken neck as something tripped him and sent him careening towards the staircase that had just now decided to move away, thereby leaving a very gaping hole down to the lower floor; luckily, his bag got caught on a suit of armour and tugged him back, though it caused an unholy ruckus as the suit crumpled from the force, metal parts flying everywhere.

Dazed, he reached for his wand and got a sticking hex for his troubles that had him holding his wand in his pocket, but unable to pull it out. Growling in frustration, he peered up, meeting with the by now expected sight of four Gryffindor first-years standing over him with triumphant smirks.

"Seems someone's forgotten their bodyguard this time."

"You are _dead_ when I get free," he growled at the boy, tugging against the spell that was keeping his hand in his pocket.

"Doesn't seem so from here," Finnigan pointed out with a nasty glint in his eye. "Far easier to pull off a surprise attack, innit, _Snape_?"

"I'm sure you'd know better than I, Finnigan," he shot back. "How was your hospital stay, by the way? I'd not had time to ask you before."

"You're going to pay for that."

And, apparently, the payment Finnigan wanted was Old Testament type, in the form of that same spell he'd been hit with. Luckily for Evan, the other boy either didn't know which spell it was, or else didn't know how to cast it, because he hit Evan in the face with something that made the roots of all his teeth and the bone of his jaw ache fiercely, but didn't otherwise appear to do any further harm when he moved his mouth.

Though he could imagine that he'd end up with bruising, too, which was going to be hell to hide, from Hermione and the teachers both.

"I'll make sure next time you don't get off so easy," he promised darkly, fighting not to slur a single sound, though his jaw was stubborn to cooperate. He boosted his own resolve with the pride of managing to keep the statement vague enough so as not to incriminate himself about attacking Finnigan. He had no intention of getting punished for that retroactively.

"Oh, I'm shaking in my pants, I really am. You've proven to be _such_ a menace to us."

"You weren't singing that song when you had to swallow Skele-Gro by the bucket, did ya?"

That earned him a kick in the shin that almost had him yowling in pain; he held it in through sheer will alone (and very, very tightly clenched jaw, of course, which just made _it_ hurt even worse, and compounded to the pain). This was a new one – they'd never gone so pedestrian, yet so brutal, as to resort to kicking. He felt apprehension rise in the back of his throat.

"You know, maybe if he thought to wash his hair every once in a while, he might actually see us coming and be a challenge," Thomas pointed out.

"We should help him with that," Weasley said, almost thoughtfully, and Evan had just enough time to think _oh, shit_ , before he got a faceful of water.

At least it wasn't soapy water. Thank Merlin for small mercies.

"See, isn't that better?" Finnigan said as Evan spluttered and coughed. "A little effort, and you might just stop dripping grease all over your homework."

"At least I don't have a problem with completing mine," Evan replied, glaring at the boy and clenching his fist; the sticking hex was weakening, so if he could distract them for just a little bit longer, he'd be able to get away. "I'd help you with yours, you know, but I fear nothing could heighten _your_ intelligence to the point where it'd be helpful– ah!"

Merlin, but it hurt to be kicked in the shin. It came to him that they were hitting him there specifically because he'd accidentally broken Finnigan's leg – yet _another_ instance of targeted revenge.

"Are you calling me stupid?"

"Well, if you – ah – have to ask, that should be answer enough," Evan shot through clenched teeth, hating that tears were dripping down his nose from the whole thing, the pain and the helplessness and even, to his horror, the terror that was starting to stir in his mind. He'd declared war on them with that move against Finnigan, but by Merlin, he should have thought it through a little better; no matter how good he was and how satisfying it had been to get revenge, it was still four-on-one.

His hand was almost unstuck, though; a few seconds more, and he'd be able to fight his way out.

"You are going to regret–"

" _Mister_ Finnigan! You will not finish that sentence if you know what is good for you!"

It was like lighting had struck; one moment the four Gryffindors were surrounding him, the next they were five steps away, and Evan had no clue when they'd managed to move so fast.

With a final tug, he finally unstuck his hand and pulled his wand out, pushing off the ground to sit up and properly survey the scene, fighting to ignore the insistent throbbing in his right leg and jaw. McGonagall looked beyond furious – Evan had seen his dad incandescent with rage a few times, an extremely frightening sight, but frankly, the bloody woman scared him ten times more in this moment – and for the first time in his life, Potter and his gang looked about as frightened as he'd always wanted them to feel, cowering under her laser-like gaze.

"Mr Snape, can you stand?"

"I..." turning onto his knees, Evan managed to right himself, though his leg could barely take any weight; it wasn't broken, but the throbs of pain were still far too strong for him to stand properly, and his stomach roiled sickeningly for a long moment, before he managed to breathe through it "Yes, ma'am," he confirmed breathily, wiping the water and tears and sweat from his face with his sleeve.

She took one last look at him, before turning to her four Lions. "And _you_! I am disgusted with you! Tormenting a student like that! My Gryffindors! I have never been more ashamed of you in my life!"

"He started it," Thomas pointed out quietly. "He attacked Seamus first."

"I've not!" Evan exclaimed, glaring at them. "I was minding my own business!"

"You put me in the hospital wing! Do you have any idea how painful having to regrow my teeth was?!" Finnigan yelled out.

"Do you have any proof for this claim?" McGonagall demanded to know.

"No, but I saw his cat right before it happened."

"If you've not noticed, Mr Finnigan, this castle is full of felines," the teacher pointed out harshly, "and cats roam where they will. That is no proof at all! And it would not condone attacking someone the way you've done just now even if it were! You're all losing fifty points each for Gryffindor, and you can expect detention until the end of the year." The way they all hunched in on themselves looked bloody glorious, really. "I thought you'd been raised better than this, Mr Potter, but it seems that your guardian has not taught you the meaning of Gryffindor integrity."

"Did you expect him to?" Evan muttered, earning himself a sharp look but no other response.

"And you, Mr Weasley! Your mother would be appalled to see you now! Even your twin brothers know better than to bully someone like this! You are all a disgrace to the Gryffindor House. Now get out of my sight, and the next time you do something like this to another student, I will not be nearly so lenient."

She stood in wait until they scurried off, before taking several deep breaths and turning to Evan.

"You are coming to the hospital wing."

"That's all right," he assured her, his head still quite occupied with images of those four being dressed down so harshly. "It's not so bad."

"Do not test me, Mr Snape," she warned, and Evan reconsidered; Hermione was expecting him, and he _had_ been looking forward to snooping about the Ravenclaw Tower, but between that and dealing with McGonagall... well, he chose to go with the line of least resistance.

"Fine."

Still, he _did_ feel vindicated when Madam Pomfrey declared him only heavily bruised where they'd kicked him and that botched spell Finnigan had performed on him, and the Bruise Balm and some Pain Reliever were quite capable of taking care of all that. McGonagall let him get back to his afternoon plans with a huff, and he hurried, for the third time, towards the Ravenclaw Tower, firmly ignoring the uncomfortable itching of fear that was starting to claw up and down his exposed back.

He was _not_ going to let Potter and his band of Junior Marauders make him afraid, he was _not_.

(And if in fighting that feeling, he completely forgot about Quirrell's extremely suspicious behaviour he'd witnessed, well, he was going to be the only one to blame himself for it when that strange event finally explained itself fully – right when it was just that smidgeon too late to make any difference.)

* * *

Rubbing her forehead tiredly, Minerva watched the owls fly out until they were mere specks on the horizon, before releasing a weary sigh and trudging down towards Albus' office, feeling more despondent than she had in years.

"What is it, my dear?" her friend asked once she dropped into his visitor's chair, moving from his seat to join her by the fireplace; the fire was weak, and its glow could not heat her insides right his moment.

Albus offered her his handkerchief, and she took it, pulling off her glasses to wipe at her cheeks and eyes.

"Oh, Albus..."

"Tell me," he implored, taking her hand in his wrinkly ones. She offered him a watery smile filled with sadness and shook her head.

"Sometimes I feel like I am such a failure. All I do is hurt people. Dougal, the war, and poor Elphi. Oh, I miss him horribly sometimes, Albus. Me and my stubbornness. And now... my failures never stop hurting people."

"Minerva, dear..."

Sniffing, the witch clenched Albus' hand in support.

"I caught Harry Potter and his friends tormenting Lily's boy."

Albus released a saddened sigh and scooted his chair over so that they were both facing the fire.

"Oh, it was horrid, Albus, and I know it was not the first time. All because of that hatred between Sirius and Severus. I should have done more to stop them all those years ago, I should have cared more."

"We are none of us infallible, Minerva."

"But you saw, Albus. You saw, and I didn't want to see."

"I could very well not have," he admitted to her, sounding every one of his over hundred years old. "Had Lily not come to me, I dread the thought of what might have happened. And even after... before Tom's fall, I had always considered Severus to be one of my closest, but no more than a member of the Order I had had to place considerable effort to recruit. I had known it would be worth it even at the very beginning, of course, but I... I suppose I had become as set in our ways as you, in that time. Were it not for that wonderful girl and her stubborn persistence to change us all, I fear Hogwarts would have remained in its apathy even now."

"And this is how we thank her, by letting her son be bullied. I should have let her and Severus know the last time, I should have."

"You know as well as I do, Minerva, that some battles cannot be fought for others."

"Well, this isn't one of them!" she said fervently, shooting the man a glare. "They are children, for Merlin's sake! Eleven years old! They should not know the concept of hatred and unkindness, let alone be comfortable with it!"

"Tell me everything."

So she did, from the moment she'd heard first indications of something unsavoury happening to the moment she'd stumbled upon them, to the sneaky way she'd approached them in order to properly catch them in the act this time, to the dressing-down she'd given them and having to escort Evan Snape to the hospital wing, and finally to the letters she'd sent to their parents and guardians, informing them of their children's behaviour and her request that they have a serious sit-down with their children at first available opportunity.

She'd failed once to stop this from happening, and she'd sworn to herself that she would not do so again. And she also knew whom she would release her anger on – Sirius and Remus should have known better than to put such thoughts into Harry's impressionable head, and Severus, as well, into Evan's (because she was quite certain that Seamus Finnigan was right in accusing Evan of causing his injuries a few months back, and she was quite aware that Evan was taught how to defend himself in more violent ways, as well).

"They are young still, Minerva. There is still time."

"Did you think that when it was James and Severus, too?"

Albus remained silent, but his eyes were sad and he seemed sapped of all his energy. It was such a strangely familiar sight these days that Minerva rarely questioned it anymore, but thinking on his words from just minutes before, she began wondering about it anew.

"Albus, won't you tell me what's changed you so much?"

"The young," he answered. "I fear that living this long might be a curse we magical folk must endure as price for the advantage we have over Muggles; to still feel quite strong and powerful, and yet remain left behind as time marches on with the next generation. I had forgotten, my dear, that society changes so quickly, and it took nearly losing a boy who had become a son to me to remember it."

Minerva gasped quietly, turning in her chair to fully face him.

"But, Severus would never have..."

"You know who I am," he told her, surprisingly harshly. "You know the things I had done. Most importantly, you know how it was when the war began in earnest; in my quest to protect humanity, I had had to become blind to it. Make no mistakes, Minerva, I do not regret it. There must always be at least one, and I had taken that position gladly. I _will_ take it gladly once again, when the time comes. If those young ones are to remain our hope, then we must do all in our power to protect them, and that is the hand that has been dealt me. But it never comes without a cost. You feel that you are a failure, my dear, but you do not truly know the meaning of such a word."

"Sometimes, Albus," she said, finding that the depth of negativity he let her glimpse sometimes whaled her own so drastically she felt almost insignificant by comparison, "you have a nasty tendency to brood. I suspect that is why you and Severus like each other so much."

"Oh?" he asked, eyes brightening almost immediately. "What would you have me do, then?"

"Accept it, and move on," she advised. "I have learned that this is the only way to move forward, after Elphi. I had refused him for so long, because of a girl's guilt over jilting Dougal so horribly all those years ago, and because of a girl's love, that only losing him so very quickly after finally accepting him could have ever truly opened my eyes to the situation."

And what a fool she'd been; she'd considered herself so very mature, at eighteen, when she'd fallen in love with Dougal McGregor, but in truth, she'd been nothing but a naïve girl. Accepting his offer of marriage, and then changing her mind and refusing after the fact because her parents had taught her that marriages between magical folk and Muggles could never be truly happy, it had been such a horrid thing of her to do to him, and she'd felt eaten alive by it all the more for her longing for him that had held her so many years after.

And her dear Elphinstone, who'd been such a friend to her even when she'd only just joined the Ministry under his direct supervision, who'd had the patience of a saint as he'd waited twenty-five years for her. Oh, how cowardly she'd been not to face and properly address her lingering feelings for Dougal, that she'd made him wait until after Dougal's death had made the point moot to truly accept him as her husband, only to lose him less than three years later to a Venomous Tentacula of all things.

Fate was a cruel thing, sometimes, and she'd only known it after he was gone, because only then had she truly understood that in refusing to face her memories and feelings of youthful, inexperienced love for Dougal, she'd also blinded herself to the mature, experienced love that had grown in her years before Elphi had ever proposed the first time.

And it was children, of all things, that had taught her the futility of sustained regret; Armando Dippet had once told her, when she'd been but a girl upset over the discord between her parents, that Hogwarts would provide, and she'd learned that it was truly the case. It only provided in ways that were not at first obvious, nor straight-forward – it'd provided Minerva with a chance to gain the experience she'd need from it all, and it was this experience that she could now share with Albus, as well.

"You've been tormenting yourself over this for long enough, Albus," she told him, laying her other hand over his where it was still grasping hers. "What's been done is nothing that can be changed, and what is now important is that you know to prevent yourself from making the same mistakes."

And, she realised as she said it, that was exactly what she needed to do with this problematic situation, as well. She could no more change the way she'd not reigned James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew in than she could turn back the time and gain back all those years she could have had with Elphinstone if not for her own stubbornness and fear. But there was something she _could_ do, and that was to stop it from happening again, mirrored in the next generation.

Fawkes released a gentle trill and flew over to sit on Minerva's shoulder, and Albus pulled his hands out from hers to pet his magnificent bird gently, even as Minerva did the same.

"You are absolutely right, as always, my dear." His countenance was far lighter than it had been before, and he looked decades younger, the Albus he'd once been, and the Albus he still was when distracted from his own woes – the Albus she loved best. "We live so long as we learn, and I feel that I have some learning in me yet."

"That's the spirit," she agreed, truly smiling for the first time since she'd realised what was happening between the first-years. "Now, I do think you should take some time from your busy schedule to speak with Severus about all this before my official letter arrives; that boy is liable to cause quite a ruckus if caught off guard, if I remember correctly."

Chuckling, Albus stood up. "Yes, you have him pegged quite right."

"Oh, and Albus? For all my reservations about him over the years, I _am_ glad that you've found him; nothing is worse than loneliness, and I fear you've been too lonely for far too long."

"And in that, you are so much wiser than I," he assured her, watching Fawkes take flight as Minerva stood up, as well. "Thank you, my dear. I truly appreciate all the concern you've spared a foolish old man like me over the years."

"To see the day you call yourself 'foolish'," she replied, patting him on the shoulder, and receiving a mischievous smile in return. If nothing else, then Albus' ability to find humour in himself had improved by leaps and bounds in the last decade.

She left his office in far lighter spirits than when she'd arrived, to the image of Albus petting Fawkes one last time before vanishing with a twist of his step, thinking, as she did so, that Hogwarts truly did provide the most important of things – it provided hope.

* * *

Most upper-years may not have cared for the House Cup much, but losing two hundred points in one afternoon did not win them any favours. Worse still was the fact that Ron received a Howler from his mum the next day, and only it being a Sunday saved them from extremely public humiliation; Harry didn't get anything, though if McGonagall had been smart enough to owl Remus as well as Sirius, then he was going to be getting it when he got home (probably horribly, too, since Remus would have plenty of time to kindle their anger with him); Dean got an extremely angry letter that made him actually cry; and Seamus's mum sent him a one-sentence note that said he'd be grounded for the whole summer.

And, naturally, Ron's brothers were completely pissed at them, too – Fred and George, because they liked Snape and they'd been wanting to have Gryffindor win the House Cup, and Percy because he was disappointed with them for attacking another student.

Bushyworm Granger was in the Great Hall for breakfast, sitting with Snape, and so got to witness Mrs Weasley screaming out of the red letter along the lines of ' _your father and I raised you better than that, Ronald Billius Weasley, how could you even think to attack another student!_ ' and ' _Lily is one of my dearest friends, how am I supposed to face her after what you did to her Evan?!_ ', which made her go pale and disgusted with them, while Snape only smirked in satisfaction, the bastard (and they'd not even done much to him, really, just gave him a few bruises here and there, which was several orders of magnitude less than what he'd done to Seamus, but no one cared about that, did they, since it was all about the poor, poor Slytherin).

They had one more Quidditch match to play at the end of May, against Ravenclaw, and Harry was not surprised to see that Granger was firmly in the Ravenclaw camp, being especially loud and flashy about it, to the point that she was even somewhat distracting. To top that off, true revision for the end-of-year exams had started in earnest, and there was ridiculously much to do, and very limited time in which to do it (as they were having regular detentions over the weekends).

Still, the dead unicorn or the Death Eaters after the Stone were never far from Harry's mind, even if he couldn't put much effort into keeping track of what was going on. The lack of time and the sharp eye all the professors and prefects seemed to suddenly have on them also prevented them from pulling off most of their pranks (including whatever scheme Fred and George had wanted help with), even when they could use the Invisibility Cloak, as well as properly plan anything against Snape. It seemed that this, at least, would have to wait until next year.

Then, at end of May, some two weeks before their exams were scheduled, Hagrid sent Harry a note about finding an injured unicorn in the Forest again, though alive this time, and that brought the whole thing back to the forefront of their minds.

On top of that, they got a note from McGonagall three days later, saying:

 _Your final detention will take place at eleven o'clock tonight. Meet Mr Filch in the Entrance Hall._

 _Prof M. McGongall_

"Well, if that isn't suspicious," Seamus muttered. "Eleven in the evening?"

"Seems so," Harry confirmed, looking up towards the High Table, though it seemed that McGonagall wasn't there. Frowning, he shrugged. They'd had two of their detentions with Filch already, and while he loved to spew crap about 'the old ways' and have them scrub floors and toilets (and still hated them for nearly running all over him at the beginning of the year), there was little he could actually do to them when he couldn't do any magic, and so they weren't truly afraid of him, not the way they were of McGonagall, who was still very angry with them, even all these weeks later.

Filch led them outside when they met him that evening, grumbling in his usual vein that Harry had no intention of listening to. He marched them all the way to Hagrid's cottage, where they were met by the half-giant and his enormous boarhound, and suddenly Harry felt his spirits lifting – if Hagrid was here, waiting for them with two lanterns, then there was only one thing it would mean.

They were going to look for unicorns.

"Abou' time," Hagrid said when they finally approached him fully. "I bin waitin' fer half an hour already. All right, boys?"

"I shouldn't be too friendly to them, Hagrid," Filch told him coldly. "They're here to be punished, after all."

"That's why yer late, is it? Bin lecturin' them, eh? Yeh've had plenty of chances fer that, Filch. I'll take over from here now."

"I'll be back at dawn for what's left of them," the caretaker said nastily, before marching back up to the castle, leaving Hagrid to shake his head.

"Are we looking for unicorns, Hagrid?" Harry asked, earning himself a stern look.

"I'm disappointed with yeh, Harry. 'S not right, attackin' a student four on one."

And, in spite of having heard if so often lately, Harry still found his cheeks heating up in embarrassment.

"Yes, we're lookin' fer a unicorn. It's the second time in a week one's bin hurt badly by summat, and we're gonna try an' find the poor thing. Now, it's dangerous what we're gonna do tonight, an' I don' want no one takin' risks, understood?"

The four Gryffindors nodded their heads obediently; Harry felt excitement begin to thrum in his blood. _This_ was adventure, and one condoned by their Head of House. It made that attack on Snape worth it, if he could finally figure out what in the world was going on at Hogwarts.

"Look there," Hagrid continued, leading them to the edge of the Forest. "See that stuff shinin' on the ground? Silvery stuff? That's unicorn blood. That's what we're lookin' fer. Now, there's nothin' that lives in the Forest that'll hurt yeh if yet with me or Fang. An' keep ter the path."

The all again bobbed their heads obediently.

"Good. Now, we're gonna split inter two parties an' follow the trail in diff'rent directions. There's blood all over the place, it must've bin staggerin' around fer a while."

"Hagrid, the other unicorn, was it dead?" Harry thought to ask.

"No. Luckily, I got ter her before she died," Hagrid said, and Harry answered with a relieved smile, even as his stomach began to churn at the thought – Granger had told them, back before she'd gotten so angry with them for attacking Snape, that drinking unicorn blood could keep people alive. If that was the case, then whoever it was hadn't managed to do the deed earlier in the week, and _that_ meant that there was, in fact, something that _would_ hurt them, even with Hagrid and Fang by their side.

"Harry, Ron, yer with Fang, he knows yeh better. Dean, Seamus, yer with me. If any of us find the unicorn, we'll send up green sparks, right? Yeh know how to do those?" They bobbed their heads again. "An' if anyone gets in trouble, send up red sparks, an' we'll all come an' find yeh. Be careful, right? Let's go."

Harry and Ron chose to go right, and Fang followed next to them, his leash in Ron's hand, though the dog already looked cowered. Harry wasn't surprised that they'd gotten saddled with him – he'd gotten to play with the great boarhound during the winter hols, and if there was one thing to know about him, it was that Fang was a big baby, a coward.

"Be careful," Harry told his best friend silently. "Whatever's been hunting them is probably there right now, if Bushyworm's right and it's about drinking blood."

"Yeah," Ron said nervously, looking about. Harry took Ron's sleeve in his fingers and made sure to keep a good grip as he led them forward from one bloody smear to another, and after a moment or two, he felt Ron's fingers tangle in his own sleeve, too, so that they were properly connected. It was an old trick of theirs, and one that still came in handy from time to time.

They mostly moved in silence, for what Harry thought had to be at least an hour, maybe more. The trail led deep into the Forest again, though with the moon barely starting to wax, everything felt far darker and sinister than it had been the last time.

"I don't think this is such a good idea," Ron murmured, voice shaky, as a hoot broke the silence. Harry was, in spite of himself, starting to feel the same, no doubt in part because Fang was starting to release tiny little terrified squeals and whines the further they went.

"We can't quit now," he said back, fingers spasming in Ron's sleeve. "The blood is getting thicker."

And the trees were starting to be a little less dense here, as if... yes, Harry confirmed after a few dozen steps, there was a clearing up ahead.

"Look," he murmured, tugging Ron closer and pointing with his other hand. There, in the corner of the clearing, tangled in some roots, was the unicorn, its body gleaming white even with so little moonlight. They got a little closer, just enough to step out onto the clearing, so that Harry could confirm the poor creature was, like that last one he'd found, dead.

They stood in silent mourning for a long moment, feeling the sadness in the very magic around them, before Harry finally pulled out his wand with the intent of sending out a warning flare; before he managed to send it out, though, Ron tugged sharply on his sleeve, and Harry finally registered the slithering sound emanating from a bush near the unicorn.

In his moment of stillness, a hooded figure came out, crawling across the ground like some stalking beast. It moved towards the unicorn and bent down over the large gash in its side and, to Harry's and Ron's utter disgust and shock (but not surprise), began drinking its blood.

Fang released a high-pitched, panicked yowl and bolted for the trees and Ron, whose hand was tangled in his leash, was yanked back with him, tearing his fingers away from Harry's sleeve, and making Harry lose his grip, as well. Ron's shout of surprise made the figure lift its head and turn towards Harry, the front of its cloak stained a silvery colour of the unicorn blood. It was so much faster than Harry could have ever imagined, and he took a terrified step back out of instinct before his determination could assert itself, his head splitting open in pain, feeling as if his scar had caught fire. It was worse than he'd ever experienced (and he'd felt this sort of localised pain from time to time throughout his life), but he somehow found the strength to push through, and lifting his wand, he aimed at the figure, yelling: " _Petrificus Totalus_!"

The light of the Curse flew true, but the figure raised its arm swiftly upwards and the spell shifted direction into the sky, reflected off some sort of protective barrier; Harry tried again, though his vision was becoming foggier by the second, as his head was filled with unfamiliar sensations he couldn't struggle through, pain and heaviness and a sense of presence that he couldn't quell, and his second curse flew wildly as he stumbled and fell back into the thicket, heart galloping in his ears madly, becoming louder and louder with each second until it came to him that it wasn't his heart he was hearing at all, but rather the actual sound of hooves beating the forest floor of something that in the next moment leapt straight over him and charged at the cloaked figure.

The pain lessened almost immediately, but it took another minute or two for it to pass enough that Harry could open his eyes and survey his surroundings – the figure was gone, and in its stead was a horse-like creature that resembled a human, pale in the weak light of his forgotten lantern and the moonlight.

"A centaur," he released, not quite aware of it. The centaur, blond-haired and palomino-coated, trotted over to him and bent down to peer at him with astonishingly blue eyes.

"Are you all right?" he asked, helping Harry to his feet.

"Yes, I– thank you."

Lifting his eyes, Harry realised that the centaur was studying his forehead.

"You're the Potter boy," he said, frowning mightily. "You had better get back to Hagrid; the Forest isn't safe for you at this time. Hm... can you ride? It will be quicker this way."

Still a little discombobulated, Harry could only nod, clambering onto the centaur's back when he lowered himself on his front legs.

"My name is Firenze," he added as Harry clutched at his human waist to keep himself from falling over when the centaur straightened to his full height. And just in time for others, too – two other centaurs burst from the trees, heralded by galloping sounds, looking quite a bit angrier than Harry thought was necessary.

"Firenze!" the wild-looking centaur with extremely dark colouring thundered. "What are you doing? You have a human on your back! Have you no shame? Are you a common mule?"

"Well, thanks a lot," Harry muttered, glaring at the centaur.

"Do you realise who this is?" Firenze demanded to know. "This is the Potter boy. The quicker he leaves this Forest, the better."

"What have you been telling him? Remember, Firenze, we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movement of the planets?"

Huh? Blinking, Harry tried to parse out the meaning of that word-vomit, without much success.

"I'm sure Firenze thought he was acting for the best," the other centaur, red-haired and bearded, with a somewhat lighter body than the first one, said gloomily, pawing at the ground with his front hoof.

"For the best!" the dark centaur exclaimed, kicking his legs back in anger. "What is that to do with us? Centaurs are concerned with what has been foretold! It is not our business to run around like donkeys after stray humans in our Forest!"

"Hey!" Harry finally shot back, outraged. "I'm not a stray! I was looking for the dead unicorn! The one right there, that someone killed to drink its blood! Don't you care that a creature like that was killed in _your_ Forest?!"

"The boy is right," Firenze bellowed, rearing on his hind legs so suddenly Harry almost fell off, managing to grab hold of the centaur's shoulders in the last moment. "I set myself against what is lurking in this Forest, Bane, yes, with humans alongside me if I must."

"Yeah, and against someone _that_ evil, we need to work together," Harry agreed.

"You do not know anything, child," the dark centaur exclaimed, shooting daggers with his eyes at Harry. "Do not presume to understand what is beyond you!"

Firenze, releasing an angered huff, turned around and jumped into the forest, leaving the other two behind; Harry clutched to him as best he could, trying to find a way of working with the powerful movement of the centaur's horse body. He'd never ridden a horse before, not even with a saddle, let alone bareback, and so he wasn't quite sure what to do.

But, finally, Firenze slowed down to a walk, breathing heavily and giving a chance for Harry to finally ask his questions.

"Who were those two, and why were they so angry with us?"

"Those are Bane and Ronan; we belong to the same colony," Firenze explained, slowing down until he'd almost stopped. "Do you understand what it means to drink a unicorn's blood?"

Swallowing, Harry nodded.

"Yeah; I already found one unicorn, about a month ago, and a friend of mine who knows all about those sorts of things explained. It's horrible, to have one's soul cursed that way, just to live a little longer."

"It is," the centaur agreed, turning to look back at Harry. "It was you, then, who found the first one. We would not have found it so easily as this one; it had been killed more skilfully. The Forest knows, and the unicorns are on guard; the male fought."

Harry nodded, thinking on how much more blood there was now than there had been the first time. He rubbed at his scar, trying to put all the pieces together.

"I saw someone going into the Forest then, too," Harry confirmed. "Firenze, do you know what is hidden in the school?"

"Do you, child?"

"Yeah; that'd explain everything, wouldn't it? It's _him_ , that's why my head hurts so badly, and monstrous enough to drink unicorn blood and not care, because he wants to make the Elixir of Life." His heart was beating wildly in his chest again at the thought that that _creature_ had been... "Voldem–"

"Harry!" Ron's panicked voice cut through his words as he emerged from the trees, Seamus and Dean right behind him and Hagrid bringing up the rear, puffing mightily. "Are you all right? What happened?"

"I... I'm fine," he said, knowing that he needed to tell them what had happened, but not in front of Hagrid. "Did you tell him, Ron?"

"Yeah, about the unicorn _and_ the thing that drank its blood."

"This is where I leave you," Firenze murmured as Hagrid pushed past them to get to the clearing. "The main path is just beyond these trees; you will be safe once you exit the Forest."

Having slid off his back, Harry moved to join his friends and offer Firenze his hand in thanks.

"Good luck, Harry Potter," the centaur said in parting. "The planets have been read wrongly before now, even by centaurs. I hope this is one of those times."

Then he was turning and vanishing in the Forest, and Harry found himself shivering a little as his three best friends surrounded him, demanding to know what had happened.

* * *

Harry told Ron, Seamus and Dean what had happened only after they were safely back in their dormitory, Neville sleeping soundly in his bed. With the adrenalin gone, he felt jittery and jumpy the whole time, nervous and maybe a little bit scared (not much, though, just a little bit more than he'd been with the troll). His head was still hurting enough to make concentrating difficult.

"You're sure?" Seamus whispered, eyes wide. "You're sure it's You-Know-Who?"

"Yeah, I'm sure it was Voldemort in the Forest," Harry repeated for what had to be the hundredth time, rubbing at his scar absent-mindedly. "Sirius always said he'd come back, and now he's trying to, that's what everything with the Stone is about. Regulus and Snape's father want to steal the stone for Voldemort. And Bane and Ronan, the other two centaurs, they thought Firenze shouldn't have helped me, they said it was in the stars. I bet it's about Voldemort coming back–"

"Stop saying his name!" Ron whispered harshly, but Harry paid him no mind.

"So, Voldemort is the one who _really_ wants the stone," Dean repeated, for clarification, "and there are two possible Death Eaters going about the school that we think are trying to steal it. But they haven't broken through the protections yet because they don't know how to get past Fluffy, because magic doesn't work on it. And we know that Regulus threatened Quirrell to tell him how to get past the protections–"

"Yeah, but how do we know that they've figured out how to get past the other ones, too?" Seamus asked. "Hagrid said there was like five or six of them."

"So, maybe that's why they've been coming to the school so often," Harry suggested. "And we can't assume that they've not already gotten what they need from them, either, not even Quirrell. But, I think that they'll need to get Dumbledore away somehow while they get through the protections, like that diversion with the troll, and we need to be prepared."

"Wait, you want us to go after them?" Seamus said, astonished.

"No... well, maybe."

"We should tell Dumbledore, though," Dean said. "He should be prepared; you said he's the only one Voldemort ever feared, right? So, it would definitely be better if _he_ fought the Death Eaters, not us."

"Would you _stop_ saying his _name_!" Ron hissed again.

"Ok, sure, we tell Dumbledore, but we keep our eyes and ears open," Harry agreed. "And the moment we figure out there's another diversion, we make sure Dumbledore also knows, too."

And if not, Harry was going to stop them himself, if it was the last thing he did. Voldemort coming back was something he'd been told would happen since he first understood why he lived with Sirius instead of his mum and dad, and he was going to make _sure_ that it didn't happen until he was old enough to properly fight him.

* * *

The next day, Harry, Ron, Seamus and Dean hurried extra early to breakfast, in order to catch Dumbledore as soon as he appeared in the Great Hall. There were very few students this early here, and it was impossible to miss Bushyworm Granger's wild hair at the Ravenclaw table, where she sat with those two Ravenclaw boys, already discussing something from a textbook.

Dumbledore came in about ten minutes after they'd come down, and they hurried to intercept him before he took a seat at the High Table, chewing hastily on the bites of food they'd already put in their mouths.

"G– Professor Dumbledore," Harry called out, and received a friendly smile as the old wizard stopped to wait for them.

"Hello, Harry. How are you today?"

"Erm, ok," he lied; in truth, his head was still hurting him from last night. "Did Hagrid tell you that we found another unicorn last night?"

"You did?" he asked, frowning slightly.

"Yeah, for detention with Hagrid," Ron confirmed.

"And this time, we _saw_ whoever it was that killed it, too! They were drinking its blood. And then Fang dragged Ron away, so the figure saw me and came after me, and I tried to Petrify it, but they made the spell fly away. Firenze the centaur drove it off, though."

Dumbledore frowned, suddenly losing the twinkle in his eye, but Harry didn't pay it much mind in his haste to tell the full story.

"So, we figured out that whoever's trying to steal the Ph– erm, whatever's on the third floor is probably the same person who's attacking unicorns, and we just wanted to warn you that we think the troll for Hallowe'en was a distraction, so that you'd know in case they try again, to not get... distracted," he finished, losing some steam at the end. He'd forgotten that he wasn't supposed to know about the Philosopher's Stone, and after everything, he didn't want to get Hagrid into trouble for telling him, either. He'd grown to really like the half-giant.

Dumbledore observed him for a long moment, before nodding his head gravely.

"I will make certain not to be distracted," he promised solemnly. "But Harry, I assure you that the Stone is very well protected, by me personally as well as many of your professors."

Harry's mouth popped open as he realised that Dumbledore seemed to know Harry knew it was the Philosopher's Stone, but he hastily closed it so as not to appear dumb.

"Ok, but if we see anything, can we come get you?"

"I would appreciate that very much," Dumbledore answered. "And you have my promise that I will look into this unicorn killer personally."

"Oh, good," he said, finding himself mostly relieved (and just a little bit disappointed). "Thanks."

"Now, run back to your breakfast before it cools; cold sausages, I find, are quite unpleasant."

Nodding, Harry turned to get back to the Gryffindor table and nearly smacked into Granger; the girl released a soft noise as all her books fell down, and she gave him a glare.

"Harry, look what you made me do!" she exclaimed, huffing as she bent down to pick up the books; Harry hurried to help her, seeing this as a prime opportunity to get back into her good graces, as she'd been mostly ignoring them or glaring at them in turns ever since that Howler Ron's mum had sent.

"Sorry," he offered, stacking the books one on top of the other. Really, why she needed so many was beyond him, but it looked almost like she'd be towered by them. "So, er... how's your preparation for the exams going?"

"Oh, I should have started earlier! I'm really nervous about them, too." Then she seemed to remember herself, because she scowled. "And you! I told you to leave Evan alone, didn't I?! Why would you attack him like that?"

"He put me in the hospital wing," Seamus growled at her; of the four Junior Marauders, he liked her the least.

"Can you prove it?" she challenged, lifting her eyebrow at him and making him growl, because that was the biggest problem in the whole thing, that they actually _couldn't_ prove it. "And anyway, I know you've been after him since the beginning of the year, he told me the truth. _You_ started it! Evan would never attack you without cause, he's not like that."

Harry looked at her in surprise. "Yes, he is."

"No, he's not," she said pointedly. "If you only bothered to be a little nicer to him, you'd know that Evan is a nice person."

"The Slimysnake?"

"Don't call him that!" she snapped at Dean. "And don't call me that horrible name, either!"

"What, Bushyworm?" Seamus asked, clearly intent on provoking her. Harry glared at him sternly, trying to get him to shut up; they'd never win her back if he was constantly reminding her of why she was angry with them.

"Yes! I'm no worm, and my hair may be a little wild, but I won't let you insult me for it!"

"Ok, ok," he hurried to say. "We're sorry about that, aren't we, boys?" he promised, glaring at them until they nodded; the name was stuck now, of course, but a little appeasement could go a long way. "We've learned our lesson."

"You have?" she asked, peering at him, and Harry nodded (he wasn't lying; he'd learned to be more careful not to get caught next time, the way Snape had been when he'd attacked Seamus). She sighed and dropped her hands from where they'd been crossed over her chest. "Oh, all right. But the next time I hear about something like this, I won't be so easy to forgive!"

In Harry's opinion, she'd not been easy to forgive _this_ time, but he didn't say anything. In spite of everything, he'd grown to like her plenty, and having her angry with him had made him slightly uncomfortable.

"So, wanna hear what we did last night?" he offered as a conciliatory gift, and Hermione nodded. He told her all about the forest as the four of them finished their breakfast, and half-way through she started frowning more and more, until in the end she looked quite upset.

"Harry, did you ever think that maybe someone is trying to kill you?" she asked him seriously.

"What?"

"Well, you did go after the troll that time during Hallowe'en, and someone tried to knock you off your broom during that Quidditch match in November. And now who knows what might have happened if Firenze the centaur hadn't come to your rescue."

"No, see," Ron got involved, "the troll incident wasn't meant to kill anyone, it was to create a diversion – you said so yourself, didn't you? – and for the Quidditch match, it was about getting Dumbledore's scheme with the Stone noticed by the Auror Office so that he'd move it."

"Or maybe they really _were_ trying to kill you," she pointed out in her isn't-it-obvious tone. "And this, going to the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the night? I know Hogwarts works differently than Muggle schools, but I really don't think this is normal even for here."

"Wait, what are you saying, then?" Dean asked her.

"What if you were lured to the Forest so that whoever's drinking the unicorn blood could kill you?"

"But, how would they've done it, then?" Seamus asked, sounding a little incredulous. "McGonagall was the one who arranged it, or are you telling us that both Filch _and_ Hagrid were tricked, too?"

"Not necessarily. Perhaps she'd set it up with Filch and he'd dumped you onto Hagrid without her knowledge. Or, maybe it was her from the start, and she'd been somehow tricked or compelled to do it. There are plenty of magical spells or potions that could have gotten Professor McGonagall to send you there against her better judgment. I mean, would _you_ expect her to put you in such danger, Harry? Her own students?"

Well... _maybe_ , Harry thought with a grimace; she _had_ been so horribly angry with them, and Harry knew better than most that people who were angry sometimes didn't quite think clearly.

On the other hand, if that _was_ Voldemort who was drinking blood, then Harry could very easily imagine he'd wanted to lure Harry out to kill him, and doing it in the middle of the Forbidden Forest, late at night when no one else was around did sound like something he'd do, especially because then he could blame it on Dumbledore; Hermione was right in that this whole detention didn't smell right – it hadn't, as a matter of fact, from the start.

"I guess we'll know as soon as they try to steal the Stone," he said in the end. "And even if Voldemort or his Death Eaters really _were_ trying to kill me all this time, it wouldn't be the first time, would it?"

"Don't do anything stupid, Harry," Hermione warned, rising to her feet. "And don't let your studying slip because of this; the exams are only a few days away."

"Yeah, yeah," Ron said with a roll of his eyes. "We hear that all the time from Padma, don't you go nagging us, too."

Hermione harrumphed as she picked up her books and hurried after her Ravenclaw friends, who were just exiting the Great Hall, leaving Harry to ponder her suggestion and wonder whether she might be right.

* * *

 **A/N:** I am sorry for taking so long with this chapter - my Master Thesis was due yesterday, so I had to wrap up all my research and actually write the thing. I'm back to normal schedule, and hopefully for those who're also following PNT, I'll now finally have the time to devote to writing it out (as well as the continuation of this story, which will be titled, predictably, 'The Lion, The Snake, and The Chamber').

The bullying has reached its climax in this story - the aftermath, however, will wait for the opening of the next one in the series (when the children finally get home for the holidays, and thus back into their parents' direct purview). I've thought about it quite a bit, how much of the immediate aftermath to show here, and I've decided to leave the adults' side of things (the immediate one, that is, not the long-term one) for the one-shot collection I'll start putting up when I'm done with this (the one-shot collection will be much broader as far as which characters are the focus, and will span all the years I'm writing about, so it'll be an ongoing thing). This story was always meant to keep the primary focus on the children, though the amount of adults-related content is going to go up at a steady pace as the children mature and start entering the adult world, and so the scenes dealing with the bullying will be framed in the context of the children's perspective. That, unfortunately, means that it'll be waiting for its own time and space, across the board. Bullying is something that cannot be dealt with in one sitting, and I don't want to short-change such an important and serious topic even a little bit, even if I have to postpone it until the next 'book' in the series (since I technically look at HP books more as episodes in a miniseries, rather than connected standalone books, I don't think this would constitute leaving a major plot point unresolved).

Also, a little background regarding this chapter - I decided to take the Pottermore info about McGonagall, since it actually fit very nicely with the whole bullying situation and how she's dealt with it in this chapter. In general, I'm pretty much picking and choosing what works for me as far as Word-Of-God info is concerned, and that includes the new movies (I'm not touching the Cursed Child with a ten-foot pole, ever). The only thing that I'm 100% keeping as canon is stuff revealed in the actual books.


	21. Ch 20: The Cost of Procrastination

**Chapter 20: The Cost of Procrastination**

The amount of preparation that came with the end of a school year was always great; this year, however, it was even more so for Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, because in addition to finding a new instructor for the Defence Against the Dark Arts – even if he hadn't been planning on removing Quirinus from the school as soon as that was possible, he'd have begun this process, because if there was one thing Albus had learned in the past four decades when it came to DADA, it was to start looking quite early, even when there was no indication that the person in the position currently wouldn't be remaining for the following year, as well, because something always, _always_ happened, and it was simply easier to start early, especially nowadays when there were very slim pickings in this department – the Board of Governors and the Council of Supervisors had managed to agree on budget extensions that would allow the school to employ adjunct professors for all magical classes, something Hogwarts hadn't seen since the days of late Headmaster Armando Dippet. There were already plenty of applicants for most classes, and he had the intention of sitting down with each department head and having them give their input on the topic, though this could wait until the exam weeks were behind them and the summer holidays had begun.

Even so, the topic was far-reaching enough that he'd arranged for his Deputy Headmistress to help him weed out those with lacking experience for such positions, which was part of the reason why he was meeting with Minerva today.

The other topic...

"Minerva, did you truly send Harry and his friends to the Forbidden Forest last night?" Albus asked her once Minerva had made herself comfortable in a chair next to him. The middle-aged witch blinked in surprise and nodded her head.

"Yes, for the detention. Hagrid needed help tracking down a unicorn; apparently, something had been... attacking... I..." Trailing off, she blinked several times again as her formerly strong voice gradually quieted. Lowering her eyes in thought, she frowned, looking down at Albus' desk. "I apologise, Albus, but what, exactly are you asking me?"

Worriedly, Albus turned away from the various documents strewn about his desk to fully face her; this was beginning to truly worry him.

"Minerva, sending eleven-year-old children into the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the night with only Hagrid as their supervision sounds like something I would do, not you. I need you to think seriously about this, please. Is it possible that you, in your anger with the boys, did such a thing?"

"No, I... Albus, did I truly..." Wide-eyed, she stared at him through the lenses of her glasses, looking each moment less astonished and more horrified. "I couldn't have!"

"Nonetheless, they were there last night," he answered. "If you would permit me, I would like to inspect your mind."

"You don't think..."

"I do not know. Please."

"Yes, of course."

He kept his Legilimency gentle and unobtrusive, and had no need to dig deep to find what he needed, as the events were still rather fresh. To his great worry, there _was_ something to be found indeed. The memory itself was innocuous enough – Minerva had spent the morning in question tending to her duties as Deputy Headmistress, and there didn't seem to be much to indicate any sort of tampering within the memory itself, except a brief moment when a light frown had crossed her face, right before she'd written her note to Harry and his friends regarding their detention. What _wasn't_ innocuous, however, was the underlying fogginess of thought process associated with the memory; normally, such things were by nature faded within hours of any event, as usually only the initial appearance of any sort of issue and the final decision as to its resolution were clear in long-term memory. Minerva's, however, held the same absent-minded thoughtlessness to it as any daily thoughts did, and that was a very obvious warning flag.

"To the best I can say, I think you might have been Confunded," Albus told her after pulling out of her mind.

"I beg your pardon?"

"There is no indication of overt mind tampering. However, I find your thought process around the time that Hagrid had informed you he would need assistance with locating the unicorn to be somewhat suspect."

"I... well, I received his notice in the morning owl post, and I dealt with it in my office as usual, along with all my other administratorial duties right after having breakfast, which is also when I decided on the children's last detention. It seemed logical to find... students... to help him, but I..." She gasped, hand flying to her chest. "I remember now! I had wanted to send seventh-years to help him, but I was deciding on Potter's group's detention at the same time, and I must have confused them!"

"Yes, and the only reason why I can imagine you would confuse such a thing would be if you were Confunded," Albus finished. "Unfortunately, as you haven't even been aware of it, this must have been done by someone skilled, and I doubt they would have exposed themselves to you in the process, so we cannot know who it was that had done it."

"But, Albus, why? Why would anyone want me to send little children to the Forbidden Forest?"

"I fear, Minerva, that this might be the deed of the same person who attempted to throw Harry off his broom," he told her with a heavy heart. He'd not done much on that front, having left it to Alastor and his Aurors, but nothing had been discovered, and with so many other things on his mind, he'd let his attention completely lapse from it.

"Are you saying that someone did it to try and _kill_ the boy?"

"Harry came face to face with the person killing our unicorns, Minerva, though he does not know their identity, as they were wearing concealing clothes."

"But you suspect."

"I do; however, those are no more than suspicions."

"Quirinus hasn't looked well recently," she pointed out. "Albus, I fear something is truly wrong with that man, and if _he_ is the one killing unicorns..."

"Yes, I know; I've had Sirius look into his movements during his time in Albania, when Sirius was in the Balkans."

"And?"

Sirius' report, back in January, had not only contained all of the information that he had discovered regarding Quirinus' movements and Voldemort rumours in the Albanian area, but also a surprising explanation as to how he had obtained this information.

 _An Albanian wizard who lives in those forests, permanently_ , Sirius had explained. _Arben Vishesela. Some sort of hermit who called himself shu-mrach-nyak, I think it's pronounced. Apparently, his kind don't even have_ spells _, for Merlin's sake, never mind using wands or other conduit for their magic. I've never seen anything like it._

Albus had, as a matter of fact, heard of shumrachnyaks (native spelling was 'šumračnjak', if his memory served him), a secretive group within the Slavic wizarding community who were of similar order to Gaelic-descended druids and Native American shamans; they were indeed known for their affinity towards natural magic, and through long training were rumoured to not have any need of 'spells' as the western wizarding world knew them. That Sirius had found one in Albania was quite surprising, as Albanians had little to do with the Slavs of the region (though that had been explained in further conversation by the mention of the Kosovo region, which was the mixing place of Slavic-descended Serbs and the Albanians); that the man had been willing to help Sirius, a British wizard who'd gone there to chase after rumours, was astounding, and gave far more credence to the rumours of Voldemort inhabiting the area than anything Sirius had discovered had, because the only reason why this wizard might have been willing to help an outsider was if he felt some kind of serious outside threat to the region under his protection.

"He has managed to confirm that Quirinus had spent a large amount of his time roaming the Albanian countryside, and especially in the areas that are known to be inhabited by Dark creatures. Sirius also managed to confirm that he was seen there around May of last year, which would coincide with the ending of his travels, but beyond that, he could not say. I have decided to remove him from the position as soon as the school year is over, but as there are only a few weeks left until the summer holidays, I feel it would be better to wait on that front."

"At the very least, Albus," Minerva agreed. "My Gryffindors have been complaining about his incompetence for months now, and I've spoken with Filius, who has had the same problem. And please, find out who is responsible for me placing _my youngest Lions_ in such danger yesterday, because this cannot be borne, not in Hogwarts."

"I fully agree, and I will deal with it post haste," he assured her, fully intending to stand by his word. "Do not mention this to anyone, however; if Quirinus _is_ involved, I would rather he didn't know we suspected him."

"Very well, but I will speak with Filius, Pomona and Horace about perhaps keeping a closer eye on the student body. Our problems with the Defence Professor position are well-known, and if Quirinus realised that you have a mind to fire him and is involved with what has been happening throughout the year, then I fear what he might do."

"I do, as well," he answered. "I've spoken with Nicolas; he's finally returned from his travel. As soon as the students are gone for the summer, the Stone will be returned to him and the protections removed, including the Cerberus and the troll."

The murder of unicorns coinciding with Quirinus' sudden deterioration, both in his health and his teaching duties, was what had largely tipped the scales on Albus' indecision on whether the former Ravenclaw truly was Voldemort's spy at Hogwarts or not. Harry's more than a little worrying report on actually coming face to face with someone who may very well have been Voldemort in the Hogwarts Forest, if correct, was an enormous danger to the school, but also an opportunity for the war effort, because this was the closest Albus had come in the last eleven and a half years to positively pinpointing Tom's location, and thus capturing him before he managed to somehow return to power.

This required some research, some delicate work, and some thinking, all of which would have to wait until he was done with Minerva.

"Good. And Albus, I truly am sorry for what happened with Potter and his friends," she said emotionally. "I cannot believe someone's managed to manipulate me in this way."

"Do not beat yourself up over it, my dear; you know as well as I do just how dangerous the Confundus Charm can be when performed expertly."

Sighing, Minerva nodded. "The sooner this school year ends, the better."

"I thoroughly agree with you on that."

* * *

The Order of the Phoenix, in its original form and function of defying Lord Voldemort's followers without the involvement of the Ministry of Magic, had become obsolete soon after the end of the war, and thus no longer existed as such. However, in the wake of destruction left by Voldemort, the Order had persevered in a different form and for a different function.

Lily considered it alike to the Freemasons, though less patriarchal and on a far smaller scale. In this form, the Order had been far more active right after the war, when there had been more room for political changes – one such brain child of the Order at that time had been the Coalition for Muggle-borns, what had become the first political party and paved the way for others; another was the idea of the integration of the concepts and modernity of nonmagical world within the wizarding one, far more long-term in scope than many other plans. But, as the momentum had gradually been lost throughout the years, so too had the activity of the Order fallen, until these days the members met more for socialising and coordinating those things they already had in the works, than coming up with new improvements to the Wizarding Britain.

This time, they met in Sirius Black's home, in his wizard-spaced attic that was large enough to accommodate all of those who showed up. There were few new members recruited since the war – Kingsley Shacklebolt had been brought in by Sirius, along with Andromeda and Ted Tonks, and though Molly Weasley's brothers Fabian and Gideon would have been part of it had they survived, her husband Arthur, rather than she herself, was a member Lily had introduced to the assembly; the only other one was a young werewolf by the name of Medeina Vilkas, whom Remus had recommended. Aside from them, the older members – the Dumbledore brothers and Elphias Doge, Alastor Moody, Dedalus Diggle and Rubeus Hagrid – had little involvement with the current projects. Regulus Black, though sympathetic and working covertly on helping the Order, wasn't a member.

By the time Lily and Severus arrived to the meeting, there were about half a dozen people already there – Sirius himself, of course (and after the mess with the children, Lily made damn certain to keep her husband and her childhood housemate _well_ away from each other), as well as Remus and Kingsley, Emmeline Vance and Sturgis Podmore, and Clotilde Babineaux, Lily's school friend. The attic, which Lily most often saw as a small Quidditch playground, was arranged to accommodate the meeting today, with a large U-shaped table in the middle and plenty of chairs encircling it.

Clotilde separated from the group to join Lily, who'd pushed Severus into the corner-most seat and situated herself next to him and was now unfocusedly getting out all her writing utensils and the folders she'd brought with from her bag, half her mind constantly aware of Sirius' and Severus' locations and movements. A year older than Lily, Clotilde was tall and willowy, having worn her hair in every shade of the rainbow since Hogwarts days – these days, it was neon yellow, not too far from her natural blonde. She mostly marched to the beat of her own drum and wasn't often stirred by things outside the scope of her direct interests, but she was fond of her friends, willing to help when needed, and greatly invested in the betterment of their society.

"Lily, hi; how are you?"

"Well enough," Lily answered with a quick smile as the witch took her seat. "You?"

"Well, thank you. Severus," she greeted Lily's husband with a momentary smile. "How is Evan? Enjoying Hogwarts more this semester?"

"More or less, I'd say; the approach we worked out for his homesickness seems to have worked very well so far, but you know him – if something interests him, he'll invest exorbitant amount of time in it, but what doesn't interest him, that's practically a lost cause. He's top of his class in Potions."

"I wasn't expecting anything less," Clotilde agreed with a smile.

"Have you heard from Bettina recently?" Lily asked her, steering the discussion away from Evan. Bettina was the fifth member of their little group from Hogwarts, that had consisted of Lily and Clotilde, Marry Potter, Alice Longbottom and Bettina Summerville. Lily had lost contact with the witch in question some time around the stillbirth and mostly heard of her from second or third hand sources.

"Not too recently. Last that I know, she was in New Zealand around Christmastime, but I'm not aware of anything else. After last year's debacle, though, I'm not surprised."

Christmas of last year had been the tenth anniversary of Mary's death, and they'd all expected Bettina to help in organising a small memorial ceremony for the Potters' friends, as she and Mary had been the closest from the group, to say nothing of the fact that she was Harry Potter's godmother. However, some sort of friction had arisen between her and Sirius in the days leading up to the anniversary that had culminated with the press almost getting wind of when Sirius and Remus had been planning to take Harry to his parents' grave, and Sirius had placed the blame squarely on Bettina's shoulders. The witch herself, meanwhile, having never handled pressure well, had taken the whole thing horribly and had disappeared practically into thin air, not showing up either for Harry's birthday or for Christmas of this year.

"I can understand her to an extent. We've both lost our best friends, but at least with Alice, there is still a possibility of improvement, however weak; she doesn't have that hope. And, of course, she was never the most self-assured of people."

"Doesn't excuse her actions, though," Clotilde said with a shrug. "Mary was not her only friend, and even if she was, she'd accepted the responsibility of caring for Mary's son. I don't see that she's ever put much effort into it."

"I'm not sure Sirius would have allowed her," Lily pointed out, casting a dark glance towards the man in question. "You know how possessive he is of Harry, and he never got on well with Bettina even before the War."

"I never understood why she'd chosen her for Harry's godmother, instead of you, in the first place."

"Because she wanted someone who wasn't so involved with the war effort to be there," Severus spoke up, making them both turn to him. "It is the same reason I chose Michael Stone to be Evan's godfather. Why else would you think?"

"Frankly, I just thought because she was angry with Alice and Lily for not including her in their agreement about being each other's children's godmothers. I would have felt excluded from your little duo back then, had I ever been a person to care much for such things, and Mary was like that."

"She'd denied it the one time I'd gotten to ask her about it," Lily explained. "But I suspected that, too."

The fact was that where Lily and Alice had been very involved in the War, Mary had stayed on the fringes, devoting herself to her herbological gardens and growing any and all plants the Order had needed – a precious commodity in the time of war. This had resulted in a much strengthened bond between the two fighting members of their group, and had had the consequence of marginalising Mary to an extent. With all three women being pregnant at the same time and sharing that inconvenient circumstance, it wasn't hard to imagine Mary being slighted.

"Mary Potter had always stricken me as someone who spoke her own mind," Severus pointed out. "I would have expected her to voice her objections on this matter as well, had there been any for her."

"Who, Mary? You really didn't know her then," Clotilde said with a shake of her head. "She was shy."

"Not with me, she wasn't," he denied. "She was very verbose the last time she deigned to speak with me."

"When was this?" Lily asked, frowning, because she herself couldn't remember one situation after she and Severus had driven their relationship underground that Mary had ever run into them.

"The day after Evan was born. She had quite a bit to say about your son looking like me," he said in a tone as dry as a desert, and Lily shook her head at this information, thinking all the while that this was _exactly_ the sort of thing Mary would have done. She'd been seen as shy because she rarely interacted much with others. But, the truth was, when'd she had things to say, by Merlin you'd hear them.

The rest of the Order members arrived soon after – Ted and Andromeda while Lily was still speaking with Clotilde, followed within minutes by Medeina Vilkas, Hestia Jones and Clara Shanwick, the latter two of whom, like Clotilde, had only been part of the outer circle of the wartime Order, and had been brought into the inner circle of the reformed Order in the intervening years. Then came Amir Shafiq and Heron Birdwhistle, and finally Arthur Weasley and Dorcas Meadowes.

"Dumbledore is not joining us?" Madam Minister asked as they all took their seats.

"No, but he has instructed me to pass on his warmest greetings and to inform you he has been making progress with his contacts at Oxbridge regarding the establishment of a dual degree program," Heron spoke up. "He is somewhat preoccupied at the moment, as, from what I understand, the Board of Governors and the Council of Supervisors have finally agreed on the budget expansions." He finished this with a nod at Amir Shafiq and Lily, who were on the respective Hogwarts bodies.

"Excellent, that is one thing off our agenda for today," Dorcas said with a nod. "Now, then, Clara, you are more familiar with the issue of Balkan refugees."

Clara Shanwick was a solicitor by trade, whose primary focus had been since school days and still remained the reformation of the Wizarding Britain's justice system, which had failed her in her youth after a vicious attack by Severus' classmates. She'd accepted a temporary transfer to the Department of International Magical Cooperation after Dorcas had moved on from there to the position of Minister for Magic, largely because the Order needed someone on the inside helping to handle the rank incompetence that was the combination of former Minister Bagnold's total lack of proper direction in foreign policy and Barty Crouch's demonstrative lack of any care or interest for his own posting as the Department Head, especially now when the political situation in Europe was in such flux, from the newly unified Germany to the crumbling Soviet bloc.

Clara straightened in her seat, nodding once firmly. "Yes; so far, the armed conflict is primarily in the Yugoslav regions of Bosnia and Croatia, and there doesn't seem to be any reconciliation in sight. Now, the Wizarding Balkans are divided between the Wizarding Albania and Wizarding Hellas to the south, modern name Greece, Wizarding Slavia or Yugoslavia to the north and Wizarding Bulgaria and Wizarding Romania to the east, and these borders have stayed mostly unaffected by the local Muggle changes since roughly the First World War. The magical population of Slavia is somewhere in the region of fifteen thousand, and our estimates are at least forty percent are endangered. We've already had about a hundred requests for asylum forwarded to us from the Muggle ministry, and we're expecting more by the end of the year. My idea is to see about volunteers who'd be willing to help them assimilate once they arrive, as there will certainly be significant cultural differences to overcome. Also, the children would need to attend one of our magical schools, and it would be good if a fund could be created to cover Hogwarts' expenses for them."

"All right; we can work on that," Dorcas promised. "Lily, Amir?"

"Send us a legal request, and we will raise it on the next meetings of the Board and the Council," Amir agreed with a nod. Tall and severe-looking, with the darker skin of the Middle East, he was the head of the Shafiq family, one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and had been, along with Clara, one of Lily's very first contacts in the Order, back when she'd been a fifth-year and they, outgoing seventh-years.

"The Floo-Pow is in the final stages of patenting the Sonofloo for the British market," Clotilde declared. How she'd managed to get the position at one of the single most secretive companies in the Wizarding world, even Lily had no clue, but Clotilde's position at Floo-Pow, the only company in the world with the right to produce and sell the Floo powder, had opened some previously tightly shut doors to the Order, all of which were tied to the idea of integrating the progress of the Muggle world into the wizarding one. "For those who are familiar with the nonmagical vernacular, it's basically a telephone. For those who aren't, the idea is to allow for conversations that would not require the presence of large fireplaces, as we have more and more young witches and wizards living in Muggle-based apartments that simply have no room for a fireplace big enough to travel. The project has been in the works since before I joined the company, and we've had quite a bit of success with it in Japan, which is our fastest-growing market for technological advances that parallel the Muggle ones. Naturally, we'll need support from the Ministry in setting up a separate network for it that should be relatively similar to the Floo Network we normally use for transportation."

"And you could reach anyone with it, anywhere?" Ted Tonks asked.

"So long as they are within range of the Network's tracking magic and have a Sonofloo with them, theoretically, yes."

"That sounds bloody useful," Hestia Jones exclaimed. "How large is it?"

"At the moment it's still large enough that transporting it once it's been installed in a home wouldn't be practical, but that's also being worked on," Clotilde promised.

"Sounds almost as good as the Farsight. That's what I wanted to bring up, actually," the other woman mentioned. "Farsight has been having something of a revolution in America; it's a magical television set that can tune into a completely empty wireless frequency set inaccessible to electronic devices. If we can get that imported here, then the Ministry will finally be able to lift most of the restrictions we at the BWBC are suffering because of the Statute of Secrecy."

Created in the early eighties, the British Wizarding Broadcasting Corporation – or BWBC – was already rather infamous; the original idea had been to expand the already existing Wireless broadcasts to the television sphere; however, because of the fact that Muggle devices tended to accidentally pick up wizarding broadcasts, the idea had been deemed too dangerous to the Statute of Secrecy by the Ministry, and it was only through massive objections by several large parties led by the Coalition for Muggle-borns, objections founded on the fact that the Americans had found a way of getting around that in their Lilacbush films, that it had survived to what it was today. Still, the channel itself was heavily limited in what it could broadcast, meaning that it was, after almost ten years, still not seen as any sort of significant competition to the Wireless Wizarding Network.

"Dorcas, you were in America for a few years, you know their market on this far better than any of us," Hestia continued. "Do you think we could import the Farsight here?"

"Oh, it's been years since I've been there," Dorcas answered. "And back then Farsight was still not nearly as good as Muggle television. But we could perhaps try it on a trial basis, maybe have the Ministry work with a few volunteer households to test it out."

"It would pay off in the long run for us; we've had overtures from several distributors from Lilacbush about maybe buying some of their films."

"What's that?" Medeina piped up. "Lilacbush?"

"It's the primary wizarding film industry in the US," Lily explained. "They keep the productions small and the distributions limited to heavily-populated wizarding areas, but their movies are with obvious wizarding content."

"And they're allowed to do that?" Amir asked with obvious surprise. "That must break the Statute of Secrecy."

"Actually, it doesn't," Hestia explained. "With the rise of so much science fiction in American popular culture, those Muggles who end up seeing the films simply consider them part of an established series that encompasses all those productions – I believe the last time I spoke with them about it, they compared it to their _Star Trek_ – so at most, their regulators have had to stifle a few conspiracy theories, but even they were surprised at how little the films actually exposed their wizarding world. Farsight helps with that, of course, as well as the fact that they are never widely distributed through Muggle channels, so most of the populace don't actually even hear of them, but it's frankly astonishing."

"Not really," Remus said with a shake of his head. "Magic isn't something that Muggles can easily accept, and if you combine that with the antiquity of our world, it probably quite easily slots into their ideas of fantasy or science fiction so long as they aren't witnessing it directly. After all, Merlin has been in the collective consciousness for a thousand years, and Muggles still think he didn't _actually_ exist."

"That's a good point," Hestia agreed. "I hadn't thought of that."

"All right; we get someone from Trading Standards Body at the DIMC involved," Dorcas promised, and Clara nodded in confirmation. "Anything else?"

"There is something I have to mention," Arthur Weasley volunteered. "As you know, I work as the Head of Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, and recently, my assistant Perkins has noticed a dramatic rise in the circulation of charmed objects that end up in Muggle hands. Indeed, when I looked into it, there were at least half a dozen cases that ended up being criminal in the end."

"Oh, was one of those the one last July?" Sirius piped up. "The Ezra Xander case? With the creepy but catchy music box."

"Yes, I believe so," Arthur confirmed. "I believe the music was from a Muggle film called _The Abrams family_?"

" _The Addams Family_ ," Clotilde corrected with a grin. "And it's a telly series, not a film."

"What's that?"

"It's like a film, but–"

"Can we get on with the point?" Andromeda interrupted them. "We're here to discuss issues pertaining to Wizarding Britain, not debate Muggle pop culture."

"Right. Well, only a few cases Perkins and I deal with ever actually get farther than the Obliviators at DMAC, so no one truly notices it, but there is a big problem with magical artefacts finding their way into Muggle hands. So, I feel there should be more stringent punishments for leaving things lying around where they can be found by unsuspecting Muggles."

"More control of illegal Dark artefacts in private possession, too," Sirius agreed. "I don't think we've conducted a single raid since the early post-war days, and as a member of a Dark family, yeah, I can tell you that there are always unlawfully obtained things lying around."

"Perhaps you should propose a law to that effect?" Ted Tonks suggested. "At the very least, it should raise awareness of the danger, even if the Wizengamot chooses to dismiss it. And I imagine you'll get at least the support of the CMB."

"We could try pitching it to the WUF," Medeina offered, looking at Remus for confirmation. Where Remus had been in the Werewolf Unionist Faction since its inception, Medeina had joined only a couple of years back, and still had quite a bit of political zeal in her.

"I'm not sure how well that'll go over, though," Remus answered with a grimace. "You know a lot of the WUF members have things of that sort going on the side. Still, I suppose it couldn't hurt."

That decided, they finally got around to the true purpose of today's meeting – Dorcas' idea of creating some sort of advisory body to the Minister for Magic. Lily had finally caved and given her assent about a month back, after several conversations with Severus about it. While he wasn't keen on it, what had finally decided it had been her own caution in the idea, as it had assured him she was going to be careful not to get drawn back into wizarding politics.

And, truthfully, Lily wasn't much interested in it, either. At twenty, getting tangled up in politics in order to fight the struggles of the disenfranchised and those who'd been discriminated against had felt exciting and worthwhile. At thirty, she was mature enough to see the underlying underhandedness and deception necessary for such things as politics, and she'd come to loath them, even as it had finally clarified why so many former Slytherins found their vocations in the Ministry. So, she wasn't very keen on re-joining that particular ring; she'd mostly accepted Dorcas' plea because she'd felt obligated to see the whole thing that she'd started all those years ago through, and because in spite of her seven-year absence from the political scene, she still held that same fervour for justice and equality that she always had, and that she knew she'd hardly manage to get anywhere except the political arena.

"We've all agreed long ago that our governing system needs restructuring. That and the process of proper integration within the shadows of the Muggle world have been our two long-standing goals ever since the War, and now we have a chance to do that," Lily spoke up. "With Dorcas as the Minister, if we play our cards right, we have a decent shot of not only weeding out corruption within the Ministry, but also fixing such problems as the Wizengamot having both the sole judicial and sole legislative power," she inclined her head towards Clara, who responded in kind, "and the existence of vaguely defined departments and lack of other, important sections to the government such as the military, whose nonexistence is the very reason the Order of the Phoenix was formed in the first place. I've personally chosen to focus on the integration efforts, and we're now seeing the benefits of the schooling reforms in the young generations who've come out of Hogwarts in the last three to four years." She gave a nod to Medeina, one of the first who'd gone through the new education system with great success; the girl smiled back happily. "However, as Dorcas is still rather new in the position, we can't make big waves yet. So, Dorcas proposed a really good idea to me about half a year back, and I think it's worth going through the trouble of fighting for it. Dorcas?"

"Yes; as Lily's said, I don't feel that my position as the Minister is secure enough yet to tackle most of the biggest problems. However, considering the incompetence of some of my predecessors–"

"Like Ignatius Tuft and his Dementor breeding program?" Hestia Jones asked.

"A blatant choice, but yes. However, if we're naming names, then Eugenia Jenkins and Harold Minchum are actually better examples of what I'm talking about – Jenkins was hailed for containing the Squib Rights riots, but she actually did more harm than good to the Squib Rights Group, and Minchum was supposedly a better Minister during the wartime years but in actuality the only thing truly worth mentioning would be the Invasion of Britain, and even that was won more due to the preparedness of the Order than anything he ever did. It's the quiet incompetence that is the issue I'm facing currently, as I've found that many in the Ministry have quite a bit of experience with those two and seem to be expecting me to go by way of them, so I'm forced to contend with this on top of the daily load of the Ministerial position. Additionally, we need to think about what will happen if I am not elected again after my term, so creating the advisory body I feel would be an assurance that whoever comes after me will be at the very least under the Order's purview, so that we might mitigate whatever damage they try to inflict on our society. I think the advisors should be a mix of party representatives and independent experts, and obviously, we'd need to get at least nominal approval from the Wizengamot, so it needs to be airtight, or else we run the risk of being rebuffed at that point, and while I do think we can find some loopholes to get it in effect, it'd be far easier with the Wizengamot's blessing."

"Well, Albus will certainly love the idea," Severus pointed out. "And he is still the Head Warlock, that carries weight. He can also assist with the immigration issue as the Supreme Mugwump; I'm certain he will be open to it if you were to send him an official request through the DIMC, and this does concern the International Confederation of Wizards."

"Oh, that's a good idea," Clara agreed with a nod. "I'll see to it on my end, Dorcas, and I'll dig you up any laws pertaining to your idea." Having moved to DIMC or not, Clara had not given up almost any of her previous duties as a solicitor, and assisting the Order on the legal front was one of her oldest ones, dating back to the war.

"Yes, and I will contact Professor Dumbledore about the advisory body, as well. What I wish from everyone here is to think about it and maybe bring some suggestions to the next meeting on how we can safely and speedily implement it, and also, who might be on it. I've offered Lily one of the seats, of course."

"As the representative of the CMB?" Clotilde asked, to which Lily shook her head.

"No, independent. I don't have time to get back into CMB business, and I don't think it a very good idea, either. Davis and Hurwitz would feel like I'm expecting to take over, and no matter our beginnings, they've made CMB what it is today. I'd rather not step on their toes, and really, they've done quite well since I've pulled out."

They threw around some initial ideas after that, though nothing much was agreed upon by the conclusion of the meeting. Severus waited while Lily packed up her things so that they could get back to their shop, as there was a new batch of orders to complete, and by the time she was ready to leave, Remus had walked over to them with the obvious intention of joining them on their way back to Diagon Alley.

"That went well," he said quietly to Lily shouldered her messenger bag and pulled out her hair from under the strap.

"If you mean, they didn't hex each other's heads off, then yes, it went wonderfully," she agreed, almost bitingly.

"I _am_ sorry about what happened, Lily; I never thought–"

"Remus, it's not your fault," she pre-empted him, sighing and rubbing her eyes. "Well, no, it is, but no more than mine. I'm putting this one on Severus and Sirius and that animosity neither is willing to let be bygone. As for Harry..." she sighed, the two of them moving to follow Severus down the stairs to the front door. "I can't say I'm not disappointed in him, greatly, but my son isn't an innocent little flower in this either, not the way Minerva says it, so I can't very well throw the first stone, and it's not my right and responsibility to do so, either. I promised Sirius once that Harry is his to raise, and that I'm there only to assist, not to steal him away, and I can't walk over that promise simply because he's made mistakes. Merlin knows Severus and I have, too, with Evan."

"I promised you I'd deal with this, and I will," Remus replied, steel in his voice that she'd first heard back in their sixth year, when he'd put himself to the task of stopping James and Sirius from bullying Severus. "History will _not_ repeat itself, if I have to take drastic measures to get Sirius to make him agree with me."

Lily nodded, knowing from experience that Remus' words were his bond on this matter, and that she could trust them.

"So, what do you really think about Dorcas' idea?" Remus asked as they exited Sirius' house, raising his voice enough to include Severus in the conversation. "I did catch that she suggested it at least before Christmas, and it's almost June now."

"Really great idea, but I'm not very keen on being part of it," Lily answered, slipping her hand in Severus' and letting him place a gentle kiss on the ridge before tucking it into the crook of his arm so that they could walk with their sides pressed together more fully. "Will you be throwing your name in for the WUF representative?"

"Honestly, I'd rather not," Remus answered with a shake of his head. "And, if things align, then I might just have no time for it, either. Albus has suggested that I take up the position of the Adjunct Professor for Defence at Hogwarts starting next year."

"Oh, he's actually suggested it to you?" Severus said with a roll of his eyes. "He's been practically dogging _me_ about the Potions position. First it was to replace Slughorn, now it's to work under him, as the man seems to have decided to see our children through their schooling, no doubt to _collect_ them." He sneered that last part with impressive dexterity of face.

Lily sniggered. "To be fair, you've been very vocal about Sluggy's somewhat lagging competency. You can't very well blame Albus for thinking those were your versions of hints about being a teacher."

"Severus, a teacher? I shudder at the very thought," Remus said mirthfully, clearly enjoying the day as much as Lily was. It was quite beautiful out, warm and sunny, and they'd agreed to walk instead of Apparating; after having to conceal their relationship all throughout its early years up to and after Evan's birth, Lily always found great joy in being able to walk down the street arm-in-arm with her husband of ten years.

"I know, right? Next thing you know, I'll have to apply for the adjunct position to Filius, just to keep him in line."

" _Has_ he mentioned that to you?" Severus asked, eyes suddenly narrowing.

"Not Albus, but Filius has sent an owl to the effect of him giving me his support, should I apply. Honestly, I don't know how I'd find the time even if it wasn't a conflict of interest with my position on the Council."

"I don't think anyone would fuss much about you being a teacher _and_ on the Council, honestly. If you were to finally hire someone to man the shop, you could," Remus pointed out.

"No, that is out of the question," Severus stated resolutely. "There are far too many delicate objects for anyone with no experience in either potioneering or charmwork to have any contact with them."

"So find someone who has experience. You let Arthur's children help out all summer."

"Supervised. And those hellions are kept well away from our delicate work."

"So you won't even consider it?" Remus asked with a frown. "Any apothecary trainee would have enough experience that you'd need."

"I would think that given your monthly order, you'd understand the importance of proper handling. Then again, given what that child you're claiming has done t–"

Lily tightened her grip on Severus' elbow in warning, and he fell silent. While he and Remus had found a sort of peaceful coexistence through their relationships to her, there would always be plenty of tension leftover from the Hogwarts years to keep things from becoming very congenial, even without the children bringing up old hurts. She'd learned to spot the warning signs back in the summer between their fifth and sixth year, and was mostly able to cut off any impending spats that were threatening to occur.

"I think we ought to at least consider it," she spoke up firmly.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It's supposed to mean that you and I both know you'll take that offer Albus has made you so that you can keep an eye on Evan and satisfy that hurt vanity of yours about Sluggy's snub back at Hogwarts–"

"It's not _vanity_!"

"–Which means," Lily spoke over his outraged exclamation, "which means that manning the shop will fall down to me, and you know I can't do it on my own, not with all the other things I have to devote my time to."

"If it helps, I don't think it's meant to be a full-time position, at least not at the beginning," Remus butted in. "From the way I understood Albus, it would be taking over only some of the classes, until the professors find what works best for them. It'll be something of a test year for most, it seems to me."

"Still, we're barely coping with the workload as is, and that's only at half-capacity instead of full working hours," she shook her head. "This discussion is nothing new to us, Remus, we've been going back and forth on it for months. I just think this might be the push we need."

"I still say that it is too reckless."

"And I have full regard for that assessment," Lily assured her husband, leaning her chin on his shoulder until he relaxed slightly. "But even you know it's time. Long-term, I really think Fred and George might just be persuaded to apprentice with us–"

"Merlin help me, woman, you're determined to have me killed," Severus muttered grumpily, making Lily giggle; he could barely cope with Fred's and George's presence during the summer and the occasional winter and spring holidays, so his complaints about what she wanted to get those kids to agree to for the future weren't unfounded in the least. Nonetheless, she knew he actually saw their intelligence; Fred was already proving to be extremely adept at tinkering with potions, and with a little encouragement, he could be good enough to deserve an apprenticeship with Severus, while George's inventiveness when it came to charmwork sometimes left Lily a bit dazed, and she wanted the chance to properly shape that bright mind herself.

"And when they do, we'll have proper help, but until then, we need to hire someone, regardless of our wants."

Severus sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation.

"We can talk about it if I decide to take Albus up on his offer," he compromised, and Lily nodded, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder before straightening to look at Remus.

"So, does Albus think your position would be affected by that damned jinx, as well?"

"Well, actually, we were thinking of creating a completely separate position for me that would technically be the Adjunct Professorship for DADA," Remus explained. "Something more along the lines of Duelling Club leader or some such. I suggested that he should try and retire the DADA class completely and make a substitute, but he's doubtful it would work."

"It might; we don't actually know the specifics of the jinx, so it's hard to predict. In any case, it's worth a shot, and considering the latest string of incompetent teachers, even having you there as backup would be splendid; I know Evan would be thrilled."

"Would he really?"

The hopeful note in Remus' voice caused a pang in Lily's heart; ostensibly, Remus was Lily's best friend these days (Severus was, in actuality, but since he was also her husband, she didn't think he could qualify any longer), and yet he'd never been given a chance to properly get to know her son, for one reason or another.

"For all the stupidity of it, yes, he would," Severus confirmed with some chagrin. "Slytherin he may be, but he is remarkably open-minded."

"As he should be," Lily asserted. "It won't do him good to become entrenched in House stereotypes. And I think he'd love to have you as a teacher, Remus. He tends to dislike all classes that aren't taught in a way that makes them interesting and approachable, and Defence has definitely been a complete miss with him this year."

"Then I'll be sure to make it as engaging as I can," Remus promised with a smile, and Lily knew he would.

Remus really was born to be a teacher.

* * *

In the following week, while the whole school was preparing for the examination period, Albus took it upon himself to inspect the Forbidden Forest thoroughly; it had been years since he'd felt it necessary to do any such thing, and he had to admit that it was overdue, even without being motivated by his search for Tom's shade.

The centaurs were more hostile towards him than he'd expected them to be, though with the recent events, he didn't blame them.

"We do not involve ourselves with your wizarding dealings," was Bane's unequivocal answer to any and all of his questions, except to say that Mars was becoming ever more often bright, and that dark things were written in the starts for the future. However, when Albus was leaving their section of the forest, another young centaur approached him covertly, blond-haired and palomino-coated, calling himself Firenze.

"I was the one who came upon the creature and young Harry Potter," he told Albus as they walked beneath the Forest canopy towards where this event had occurred. "He should not have been here."

"Do you think it to be Lord Voldemort?"

"Mars is burning brighter every moon turn, Albus Dumbledore. This is but a respite that we are living in now. Who else?"

More and more worrying.

"How long have you known of the threat?"

Firenze shook his head. "The first unicorn was attacked two moon turns ago. But the Forest does not sense his evil constantly."

"Why do you believe that would be?"

"The answers are yet hidden from us. I cannot help you in this, Albus Dumbledore."

Firenze left him soon after, and Albus considered the possibility that Voldemort had moved from Albania to Britain as he walked back towards the school. Tom could not be more than shadows and vapour, a roaming soul bound to earth by the vilest of things that magic could create, and while he could theoretically take possession of another being for the purpose of drinking unicorn blood, Albus did not believe him powerful enough in this form to possess and control a sentient being for longer than a few hours at a time, not after the effort it must have taken to traverse the continent and cross to Britain. Most likely, then, he was hiding in the bodies of animals in the Forest, waiting for Quirinus to bring him the Philosopher's Stone, using the poor man to regain his strength by drinking unicorn blood. The fact that Quirinus' health had taken a downward turn only recently supported that theory, as well. And as to the possibility of someone else other than Tom drinking unicorn blood, Albus truly could not think of a single other witch or wizard in Britain with enough motive and blatant callousness for their own soul – or that of another – to do such a thing.

And if Voldemort was hiding in animals, it would be nigh on impossible to locate him without using powerful magic that would most assuredly anger the inhabitants of the Forest. No, it would be better to lay a trap for him just as it had been laid for his agent. But that rested on entrapping his servant first, and could not be done before all the students had left the school grounds. Albus did not think that Voldemort would dare enter Hogwarts in this form, no matter his usual boldness; the risk of capture was simply too great, and he would know his own weakness. It was why he'd remained on the continent for ten years, instead of hiding in Britain, because anywhere in Britain was too close to Albus.

So, while he couldn't do much to protect the Forbidden Forest, there was one thing that, as Hogwarts' Headmaster, Albus _could_ do. It was a simple bit of magic, really, to add to the already existing cornucopia of wards that extended well into the Forest – a beacon of safety for those of pure heart in desperate need of assistance. He could not integrate it into the wards, for that he would need more time than he had to spare, to say nothing of Hogwarts' cooperation, but he thought the beacon would hold out for a few weeks at least, just until it was safe to properly hunt that vile soul out of the Forest. Until then, it would lead any injured unicorn straight to Hagrid's door, and hopefully save more innocent blood from being spilled and lives from being lost.

Once he finished his inspection of the Forest, his plan of immediately contacting Regulus Black had to be put on hold for a day or two, as he'd received two missive that he felt could not wait – one was an official request from the Department of International Magical Cooperation, addressed to him as the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, that concerned the expected rise in refugee numbers from the warring region of the continent, and the other was a private missive to him as the Head Warlock of the Wizengamot from Minister Dorcas Meadowes regarding his support of her initiative to create an advisory body to her position when the motion came in front of the head judicial and legislative body.

These two things ended up delaying him more than a week, so by the time he contacted Regulus, the beginning of June was already upon them and the exams were scheduled to begin the following Monday.

"Are there any news, Headmaster?" the young man asked once he'd arrived at their agreed-upon meeting. Albus had informed him at the beginning of the new year about his true suspicions regarding Quirinus being the thief and the information Sirius had uncovered on the continent. Regulus had not been pleased in the least that Voldemort had a possible agent in the school, but he also hadn't seemed surprised by it, from which Albus had inferred that the younger wizard had gleaned far more of the truth behind the Philosopher's Stone's presence at Hogwarts than many others would have, and had done so when even Severus had not (and while he rarely kept Severus out of the loop of his plans and schemes regarding Lord Voldemort, Albus had made a conscious decision to do so now, as Severus' closeness to Albus tended to blind him to things of vital importance, the same ones Regulus was quite capable of seeing, considering how little protest he'd made so far).

"Yes; I am now reasonably convinced that Quirinus is, indeed, working for Lord Voldemort."

"But you are not yet ready to apprehend him," Regulus concluded.

"No; I am not yet fully certain of his guilt. I also have reason to believe that Voldemort may have returned to the island, and if that is the case, then we must do this without alerting him to the loss of his agent within the school, otherwise he will slip back to the continent and we will lose our first chance of catching him in a decade. We must be certain about Quirinus' allegiance for this reason as well, I trust you see."

"If he isn't, in fact, working for the Dark Lord, then whoever is will be alerted the moment we make our move against Quirrell. The Dark Lord's presence on the island, is that the reason why my Mark has been regaining its form, then?" Regulus asked, making Albus look at him sharply.

"May I see?"

Sighing, the younger wizard nonetheless complied. Scooting in his seat so that he could rest his left forearm on the desk between them, Regulus pulled up the sleeve of his robe to reveal the skull and the snake. Albus leaned over to inspect it; where it had been mostly just a rather prominent thing reminiscent of a tattoo faded by years of wear, now its edges seemed to be regaining their preciseness and relief. Not much, but a definitive proof that Voldemort was strengthening.

"How long has it been happening?"

"About six weeks, perhaps a little more," Regulus revealed. "I had never doubted that he had survived, not when we'd not managed to get that abomination before he'd gone after the Potters, but this is the first definitive proof the rest of his Death Eaters have gotten."

"Indeed, that is a worrying thought," Albus agreed as Regulus tugged his sleeve down and fixed the cuff. That roughly corresponded with the first unicorn attack and the worsening of Quirrell's health; Tom was getting ready for his move, that much was obvious. "Then we must act before any of the others gain ideas of perhaps finding him."

"But how do you think to even hold him? He is a soul fragment, Headmaster."

"There are magics that can be used to imprison a soul."

"Dark Magics," Regulus rebuffed. "As Dark as that Horcrux he'd created. I will not have any part of that."

"Regulus–"

"No," the black-haired main said categorically, and Albus knew that he wouldn't be swayed on this point. "No, getting and destroying that Horcrux was one thing, but I will _not_ be party to anything that tampers with soul binding, not even to trap him."

Albus had expected this, of course, though he'd hoped for a little more leniency from the younger wizard. Severus had brought Regulus to him in the height of the War, a shaking, snivelling wreck of an eighteen-year-old that had discovered the darkest truth behind Lord Voldemort and had not known how to handle it, except to sacrifice his own life to attempt to right the wrong. Ever since then, Albus had known that one of Regulus' greatest fears was tied to the idea of soul manipulation, and so his refusal to even be privy to any plans that may incorporate such magic – as they needed to, since Voldemort was nothing but a soul fragment at this point in time – was not a surprise in the least.

"Very well. Apprehending the agent will be the easiest part, as you well know. Doing it in such a way that we can also lure Voldemort to a location where we would want him will be far trickier."

"You cannot do that here at Hogwarts," Regulus stated, and Albus recognised this as Hogwarts Governor Black, rather than Regulus the Spy. If there was one thing that the head of the Black family took seriously, it was his responsibility towards the school and the wellbeing of its students.

Besides, while it may be easiest to set the trap here, Albus was well aware of the fact that too much was at risk in case things went wrong.

"No, not at Hogwarts," he agreed.

"The cave?"

"I would rather that he didn't know we are aware of his contingency."

"Then Godric's Hollow," Regulus decided. "Where he'd lost his power; he would find it meaningful. Perhaps trick him into believing that Quirrell had procured the Stone for him?"

"Yes, I agree. What I need from you is to find out if he is whom we suspect, and if yes, when he'd last had contact with Tom. It would be best if we did this so that we may have as much time as we can for other preparations, before Voldemort would expect any further contact from him."

"I'll have another chat with him this evening. We're about due for one, anyway."

* * *

Regulus left the Headmaster's office far more apprehensive than he'd arrived; but as it was a state he'd grown accustomed to twelve long years ago, he did not let it rattle him. That year and a half had been the hardest of his life, but it had taught him perseverance – what Sirius referred to as a backbone – and firmness. And while he detested the fact that Dumbledore was again playing at being a war general, Regulus was well aware of the fact that these last ten years were the aberration, rather than the norm, a breather the old wizard had given them to make as many improvements to their world as possible. This meeting, however, made one thing perfectly clear.

The time had officially run out.

And so Regulus stepped back into his role as one of Dumbledore's most valued chess pieces in this enormous game between him and the Dark Lord with nary a complaint. He'd known, when the Dark Lord had vanished only days before he and Dumbledore had planned to go after the Horcrux in that cave, that he wasn't gone, but would be regrouping and searching for a way of coming back, and Regulus had known that his position as a spy could not be retired, not so long as the Dark Lord existed in any possible form.

So it was time for a little more drastic measures when it came to Quirinus Quirrell. Dumbledore needed proof positive that Quirrell was the one? Regulus would provide it for him, and then this whole idiocy with the Philosopher's Stone could be put to rest, hopefully with the added benefit of trapping the Dark Lord himself.

He found the stuttering fool in his office, sorting some parchments by the look of things. He startled when Regulus shut the door firmly behind himself and warded it shut, and stumbled out of his chair and away from his desk almost immediately.

"R-Regulus! Wh-what are y-you–"

"That is quite enough of your games, Quirinus," Regulus said, advancing on him until the smaller man was against the wall and trying to ignore the cloying smell of garlic wafting from him. "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Babbitty Rabbitty," Regulus shot out with a roll of his eyes. "Who do you think? The Dark Lord."

"Wh-wh..."

Scoffing, Regulus pinned Quirrell by the throat with an arm. "I told you to stop with your little games. You have wasted enough of my time, and I will have an answer out of you, now."

"I-I-I don't..."

"Don't you? I suppose that answers where your loyalties lie."

"N-no, I–"

"No? But you've very thoroughly convinced me, Quirinus, over the last few months that you only wish _it_ for yourself. Fame and glory, perhaps? Being the first person to successfully steal the most valuable magical item in existence in six hundred years?"

The stuttering man looked truly cornered, but Regulus didn't miss the flash of contempt that went through his eyes.

"You care nothing for the true cause, do you? All your boasting about being the one to find the Dark Lord, and what have you accomplished? Nothing. And you deign to aspire to _our_ order." Regulus saw the surprise that flitted over Quirinus' face and mentally congratulated himself on the bluff. "What, you didn't think we spoke to each other any longer? That we are all like Malfoy and Nott, pleading the Imperius and breathing sighs of relief that there are no news? You have no idea of the true state of things, Quirinus, just like you never did. And to imagine that the Dark Lord would ever stoop so low as to even look at you, let alone consider–"

"I know far better than you!" Quirrell hissed angrily, only seeming to catch himself after the fact, his face falling back into his frightened mask. "I-I-I mean–"

"Now we come to the truth. Spare me the theatrics, Quirinus, and answer my questions. Are you trying to steal the Stone for yourself?"

"Well, you certainly seem convinced of it, so what do you expect me to say to you?" the turbaned wizard asked.

"So you _aren't_? You expect me to believe you've actually found the Dark Lord?"

"You know nothing, Regulus," Quirrell shot back. "You call yourself faithful, yet where have you been all this time? Why has there been no news of _you_ doing anything to help him?"

"I have been gathering information, you fool, and monitoring the political arena in preparation for _his_ return. What have _you_ done that is so noteworthy, do tell me? Playing at being a professor at school, tricking the others to tell you how to get past their protections to the Stone? Have you even managed to get past the wards? Do you even know what intent they require?"

"Sod off."

Regulus let his eyes harden as he pressed the man's windpipe until Quirrell was almost choking and pulled his wand with his other hand to rest the tip against Quirrell's temple. "You overreach yourself, Quirinus. True loyalty is shown by accepting the gift of the Mark, not by taking a year to learn a few measly children's tests. Now, you will do _exactly_ as I say, or you will learn what it _really_ means to be loyal to the Dark Lord. Do you understand?"

He let the man choke for a moment or two longer before pulling his arm back enough to let him splutter out a stuttered 'yes'. This time, it seemed like a true stutter, too, not that cretinism he'd been pulling all year long.

"I will get the Stone, and when I do, I will come to you as soon as you are no longer bound by this ridiculous post at Hogwarts. You will lead me to the Dark Lord, and you will be grateful that I've let you do even that much. And if you dare double-cross me, Quirinus, you will live to regret it, even if you wished you didn't. Nod if you understand."

Quirrell's head bobbed up and down, and Regulus held their positions for a while longer to drive the point home, before pulling back and letting the other man crumple to the ground in a coughing fit.

"Remember what I've said, Quirinus. The first day of summer holidays."

Then he turned and, removing the privacy wards he'd placed with one violent wave of his wand, Regulus exited the room, leaving the foolish man to his thoughts.

Revealing his own supposed allegiance like this had been a calculated risk, but one that had paid off quite well – while nothing Quirrell had said was definitive proof of him working for Voldemort, the deception he'd been conducting in the form of the frightened, stuttering teacher was broken, and Regulus was convinced.

And now that Regulus had effectively expedited whatever plans Quirrell had had for the Philosopher's Stone with his threat of getting it himself, Dumbledore would get two birds with one spell. If there was one thing common between all Death Eaters, it was their pride; Quirrell was no more likely to actually follow Regulus' instructions than Voldemort was to come back with newfound love for Muggles and Muggle-borns. And Regulus was quite certain he'd also contact Voldemort before attempting anything, if only to ensure that Voldemort knew to blame Regulus should anything happen to him, thereby buying them the time they would need to put everything in place for the second trap.

So all that was left to him and Dumbledore now was to keep an eye on the little worm and be sure to catch him in the act.

* * *

The missive from the Ministry arrived late on Friday afternoon. Albus, who was in the middle of composing a formal letter to the two Hogwarts' governing bodies regarding the changes of the Defence Against the Dark Arts class he wanted to make, didn't immediately check it, something he felt to be a regrettable mistake once he finally did get to it.

The missive was rather vague, all told, summoning him urgently to the Wizengamot regarding a very disturbing discovery within the Ministry that needed his attention. He didn't think the summon as truly urgent as it was made out to be, primarily because it would have been delivered by fire-call through a messenger if it had been, but, knowing the fickleness of their Ministry and the hastiness with which many of its employees (and especially those in very high positions) made their own biased conclusions, Albus still felt it necessary to learn the true nature of the problem without delaying it until Monday, especially in light of the Minister's plans to change her seat so thoroughly for all her successors.

Hogwarts had its own internal Floo network, connecting the used offices among themselves, but as a rule, the network was closed to the National Floo Network with only very few exceptions, such as the Headmaster's office. Attempting to fire-call the Minister's office about the summon, however, proved a futile effort, because he'd lost track of time, and by now it was past office hours, which meant that the fireplaces were all closed for the weekend.

It was common enough, of course; Ministry workers used a number of methods to gain access to the expansive spaces beneath Whitehall, but the regulation of the entrances was that much tighter after work hours and on weekends, when few people were about, and it was easiest to simply close down all of those that were hard to monitor and leave only the telephone booths open, where the guards checked every person entering and exiting.

Well, nothing for it; he was going to have to go there. It wasn't too late, just before dinnertime, and he was certain all the relevant people would still be there. Fastest and simplest was to just Apparate to London directly from the school gates, of course, but Albus decided instead to ride a Thestral – his old student Newt Scamander had requested one of the school's Thestral studs for a breeding project, a task Albus had originally thought to either assign to Hagrid or see with Newt about someone coming to pick the winged horse up, but since he was already going in that direction anyway, it seemed more practical. Besides, this way, if the situation at the Ministry proved too complex to solve in one sitting, he could visit with Elphias over night – his old friend had been almost hounding him for weeks now for an evening of dinner and conversation, and he'd certainly never begrudged Albus the use of his guest bedroom – and spend Saturday resolving the Ministry issue to his satisfaction.

That decided, Albus spared the time to fire-call Minerva and let her know he would be in London, most likely until tomorrow depending on what he'd end up finding at the Ministry, and if she would be so kind as to check on the wards on the third-floor corridor and let the other professors know to come to her if they needed anything urgently. The ward-checking was more for the routine of it than anything; Hogwarts would have warned Albus if anyone had attempted to bring them down, and Regulus had reported earlier today that there was no movement on the Quirrell front.

It was a pleasant evening, warm and cloudless. The Thestral Hagrid had picked out for Newt's needs was agile and clearly enjoyed the chance to spread his wings and properly demonstrate his top speed, and Albus had almost forgotten how much he still enjoyed flying. He'd never been one for Quidditch playing, but flight in general had always presented a great, if relatively rarely indulged, enjoyment.

He left the Thestral with Newt, managing to extract himself from Porpentina's warm invitations for dinner by appealing to her practical side – Newt's wife had been an Auror in America in her youth, and she genuinely had far fewer problems understanding the needs of the governmental position than Newt did – and Apparated to the red telephone booth that would provide him access to the Ministry.

Two steps into the Ministry Atrium, something suddenly began feeling absolutely wrong. Frowning, Albus hurried to the information desk, but his question about Madam Minister's location was barely out before he understood that he'd made a horrible, _horrible_ mistake, because the young witch sitting at the desk was knitting her eyebrows together, and her answer was obvious even before she'd said it.

"Madam Minister has left for the evening, Professor Dumbledore; she is attending a formal dinner tonight. Would you like me to–"

"No, thank you, my dear," he answered, offering her a friendly smile, even as blood began distantly roaring in his ears. "I will contact her on Monday."

How could he have been so _foolish_?!

He couldn't Apparate directly out of the Ministry Atrium, and every second that he needed to emerge topside felt like unacceptable loss, even as he turned it over and over in his mind, trying to figure out how Quirinus could have done it, how he'd managed to pass the wards protecting the Stone without bringing them down, _how_? Had Regulus helped him as part of the ruse?

Or was Quirinus just _that_ good at Mind Magic, that he'd managed to not only Confund Minerva, but also Legilimise her to find the information needed to simply pass through them? No, she would have noticed a mind intrusion, that could not be it.

Quirinus had held off on going after the Stone for this whole year, and Albus had believed this to be because he was attempting to gather information on Albus himself and his search for Tom, trying to ascertain what those in his immediate circle believed about Tom's disappearance. Not one of the professors had reported to Albus anything so suspicious as Quirinus questioning them about the protections, but he must have been working on it this whole time, must have been trying to find ways of preparing himself properly for the break-in. Quirinus was a Ravenclaw, and he had successfully broken into Gringotts last year; Albus had little difficulty in believing that he'd managed to learn all of the protections and how to bypass them, even Severus', given how often Severus had been coming to Hogwarts since the winter holidays. Even the proper intent necessary to be allowed through by the wards–

Minerva's tabby cat Patronus almost caught him off guard just as he stepped to the Apparition Point.

 _Albus, the wards and protections have been tampered with! You must come at once, the children – your grandchildren – foolish boys – they've gone after the Stone, and we cannot follow them!_

Albus was Disapparating even before the Patronus had fully dissolved into the darkening evening.

* * *

 **A/N:** Former Ministers are from HP wikia - Ignatius Tuft ('59-'62), Eugenia Jenkins ('68-'75), and Harold Minchum ('75-'80). The issues they dealt with are all Word-of-God, but I saw no reason not to use them. Farsight (literal translation of television, incidentally), Lilacbush, and Sonofloo are my inventions, but Floo-Pow isn't. Everyone knows the Addams family, and the music box is a reference way back to the first chapter. I tried to keep the acronyms clear, but if it's still confusing, all the MoM info is on HP wikia. Additionally, Arthur's proposition is directly connected to next year's CoS mess. (Also, cameos and easter eggs from the first war galore; they tie into 'The Path Not Tread')

A bit more politics in this chapter - given how much went down on the European political scene in the early 90s, I decided a while ago that I want to dabble in this to an extent. After all, you cannot tell me that wizarding countries are so isolated as to not care about any foreign relations at all (and we know they have National Quidditch Championship, at least, plus the Triwizard Tournament), and it's a perpetually relevant topic, after all, as the last couple of years have shown. Beyond that, I may have a more personal reason, which is that this is my family's history too to an extent, and for all that we ex-yu countries are footnotes in the world problems these days, the Balkan conflict was a huge thing on the world stage for a good five years. So just like the US and other western countries had refugee policies for the Yugoslavians fleeing the war, so too do I imagine the wizarding countries would, because urban warfare is not something that you can simply wall yourself away from through the use of Muggle-repelling wards and such, not when the whole country is falling apart around you. Still, I'll keep this within the scope of my characters, as I did here with the Order meeting, and leave the expounding to side one-shots.

I'm also having a lot of fun thinking up how the political situation of Yugoslavia might have impacted Wizarding Slavia in turn, and how it would differ from both the capitalist west and the communist east (we weren't a communist country, no matter what everyone likes to teach, our socialist system had quite a few key differences), but that's definitely going to stay for the one-shots, except in things that need to bleed through, such as the **šumračnjak** s. They don't actually exist, unlike the druids and the shamans, but I was unfortunately unable to find anything that satisfied my needs from old Slavic mythology (and man is that hard to come by), so I had to put it together myself. For those who want to know, the term is composed of two words, **šuma** , meaning _forest_ (pronounced 'shu-ma', our 'š' is exactly the same as German 'sch' as in 'Michael Schumacher'), and **mračnjak** , meaning _darkling_ , from **mrak** meaning _dark_ (pronounced 'mrach-nyak'; 'č' is pretty close to 'ch' in 'chair', and 'nj' (which is considered a single letter, actually) is exactly the same as the 'ñ' you'd find in Spanish 'el niño'). It's a bit of a mouthful, which is why I kept it as transliterated more than just spelled out up in the text. The name 'Arben Vishesela' is from google, since I don't know a thing about Albanian, or for that matter about typical Kosovan names that aren't Serbian in origin. The language itself is Serbian, as should be obvious from the mention of Serbs in the text, and the reason I put it in is that having Sirius go to Albania, which bordered Serbia at this point in time, allows me an option of tying into the wider international political aspect I want to touch on with this HP universe. Also, technically, Albania nowadays borders Kosovo, but Kosovo used to be part of Serbia until 2008 (it's still a disputed issue and a total mess), and there's a sizeable population of Serbs living in North Kosovo (most of Kosovars are Albanian in nationality), so that would explain Dumbledore's thoughts on the topic. You know, speaking of words and names, I do wonder if JKR chose to have LV run for the 'Albanian mountains filled with Dark creatures' after his defeat because she loves meaning in names, and one of the biggest mountain ranges of that region is called 'Prokletije' (Serbian) or 'Bjeshkët e Namuna' (Albanian), meaning 'accursed (mountains)'. That'd fit right in with her naming a werewolf 'Remus Lupin' - really, it's SO on the nose I don't know how anyone never suspected him just because of the name.

So, now that I'm done with my (possibly boring or annoying?) political geography and phylological lesson - two more chapters to go, and we're going down the rabbit hole in the next one with Harry and his friends, as well as perhaps an enemy or two. There be some action ahead!

* * *

 **AA/N:** Blu, thank you for your very uplifting words of praise about my writing! That is very gratifying to hear, and very much appreciated!


	22. Ch 21: The Alliance Uneasily Brokered

**A/N:** Several people have noted that it's hard to distinguish who 'Snape' is that's being referred to in text in any given instance, specifically with respect to the conversation between the children and Quirrell in this chapter. I'll try to make that more streamlined on edits at some point, but the rule is - consider who the person is who is speaking; usually, 'Snape' is the name they use for the one that they would consider their peer (so, Harry thinks of Evan as 'Snape', but of his father as either 'Mr Snape' or 'Snape Senior'; by contrast, Quirrell will think of Severus as 'Snape', because they're contemporaries, while 'Mr Snape' is Evan, because they always use this type of address when interacting with their students). In hindsight, I see how confusing this is. I apologize.

* * *

 **Chapter 21: The Alliance Uneasily Brokered**

The days leading up to the exams were doubly stressful for Harry, whose headache from the night at the Forest hadn't left him since; it disrupted his concentration to the point that he actually made Padma cry, for which he honestly felt bad, not least because his friends became quite worried about him, enough that Dean suggested he should perhaps go and see Madam Pomfrey. Harry's suspicion was that the headaches would not end until this whole business with Voldemort and the Stone was dealt with, and so only rolled his eyes at the suggestion and suffered.

Bushyworm approached them after their last class before the exams, looking still somewhat stressed, and asked them if they were ready for the following week.

"I am quite certain I should pass all of the exams," she confided in them, "though I know I won't be first in class in Potions even now; Evan's far too advanced for this year's curriculum, you know." (They did, in fact, know that, having had to share the class with him all year.)

"Hermione, you'll be top of the class for almost everything, you're clearly the top academic of our year," Dean told her with a smile (he was the only one still resisting the nickname, and, in fact, choosing to call her by her first name even when she wasn't there to hear). "Don't stress it, all right?"

"Yes, I know, Kevin said the same thing to me, though Stephen was a little insulted about it, to tell the truth."

"Well, I think there are far more important things to fret over than grades," Harry muttered, rubbing his forehead in a vain attempt to relieve the stabbing pains. "Like whether or not someone's finally going to try and steal the Stone."

"Oh, yes, that reminds me," Hermione said, turning to him, "you said that Hagrid got the dragon playing cards with someone, yes? I thought it over a little bit, and it came to me that perhaps there was a sinister purpose behind it."

Lifting his head sharply, Harry forgot all about his headache as the niggling sense of wrongness he'd originally felt when Hagrid had told them about the dragon egg returned in full force. Hagrid was most likely the only one still holding out when it came to the defences, and he would never have told anyone, unless...

Shoving his backpack on his back almost violently, Harry grabbed Hermione's hand and tugged her with him towards the staircase with the intent of reaching Hagrid.

"You're completely right," he told her the moment she picked up her pace and the rest of his guys hurried after them. "We need to speak with Hagrid."

"What's that, mate?" Ron asked, catching up to them on the staircase.

"Don't you think it's a bit odd that what Hagrid wants more than anything else is a dragon, and a stranger turns up who just happens to have an egg in his pocket? How many people wander around with dragon eggs if it's against wizarding law? Lucky they found Hagrid, don't you think? That's what you meant, isn't it, Mione?"

"I... yes, I suppose it is," she confirmed. "Wait, why do you think he'd tell you anything?"

"Because I know how to handle him."

He hurried down the staircase, his friends and the Ravenclaw know-it-all hot on his heels; so intent was he on getting to Hagrid's that Harry completely missed an arm emerging from one of the alcoves on the third floor and grabbing his backpack, dragging him to the side sharply. He cried out and managed to twist enough to see Fred and George were the ones pulling him away from his group.

"We just need to borrow you fearless leader for a few minutes!" one of the twins hollered at Harry's group.

"And don't worry; we'll get him back to you in one piece!"

"Would you... let... me... _go_!" Harry exclaimed, managing to slip out of the confines of his backpack straps to properly stand in front of them. "You could have just called; you didn't have to drag me from there."

"We did, actually. You didn't hear us."

"Oh. Well, what is it? I'm in a hurry."

"We wanted to discuss the end-of-year prank with you," the twin on the right said.

"The one you owe us," the twin on the left reminded him.

"Right, ok. Can we do it later?"

"Nope; it's gotta be now."

"Why?"

"Ah; it's all part of our master plan, you see–"

"–And we can't very well be sharing that with you, can we?"

Harry growled, finding that his headache was only getting worse with their twinspeak.

"Come on, mates! I'm really in a bit of a hurry here."

"What if we sweetened the deal?" one of the twins asked, cocking his head to the side.

"George?" the other asked (so Harry assumed he was Fred, then), and what followed was that weird thing they did, with the eyebrow twitches and the forehead wrinkling and all the other nonverbal communication signs they did at each other, that obviously meant something to them. Finally, George turned back from Fred and threw his arm over Harry's shoulder, beginning to lead him towards the nearby corridor, away from the noise of the student body.

"Let's say we have something every self-respecting prankster should possess, and we're willing to lend it to you occasionally."

Harry blinked, momentarily completely forgetting about the threat to the Philosopher's Stone as it came to him that George was talking about the Marauder's Map.

"Really? What's that?"

"You help us with this, you'll find out," Fred said.

"All right," Harry agreed, knowing this was his shot at getting that damned map. "I'm list– hey, where the heck are we?"

The corridor was not a familiar one, and considering the amount of nights he and his friends had spent exploring the school under his Invisibility Cloak, that was saying something. Fred and George looked around them, and the comically surprised expressions on their faces only served to unnerve Harry even more.

"Huh. Seems to me, brother dear–"

"It does indeed."

"The third-floor corridor that's been inaccessible all year."

" _What_?!" Harry exclaimed, turning his head wildly back to the entrance of the corridor. It didn't seem too familiar, but maybe... Without a thought to the twins, he sprinted back to the archway George had led him through, and when he was on the other side, he could indeed see for himself that it was the same place where he'd caught Hagrid that one time right before Christmas.

That meant only one thing – the wards protecting the corridor to Fluffy's room were down. And just like that, the Marauder's Map was the furthest thing from his mind.

"Shit," he breathed out, running as fast as he could back to Ron, Seamus, Dean and Hermione, who had had the good sense to wait for him at the top of the staircase to the second floor. "Come on, we gotta get to Hagrid _now_."

"Why?" Hermione asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at him, and he shook his head as they all began running. He needed his air for breathing, not for talking, and besides, his friends had learned by now to follow their fearless leader even when he didn't give all possible justifications for his actions. There'd be time to tell them later.

They sprinted to Hagrid's hut, where they found the half-giant sitting in an armchair, shelling peas into a large bowl.

"Hullo," he said, smiling at them. "Ready for yer exams? Is this a new friend of yers, Harry?"

"Yeah, this is Hermione," he confirmed, a bit out of breath. "Listen, Hagrid, I've got to ask you something. Remember the night you won Norbert? What did the stranger you were playing cards with look like?"

Hagrid started a little, his beady black eyes moving to Hermione worriedly.

"She's trustworthy," he promised. "She helped us get Norbert to Charlie, and she won't tell anyone anything."

It was a lie, of course, but Hermione caught on immediately, of course, giving Hagrid a nod and a pretty smile that seemed to melt the half-giant's heart a little.

"In that case, I dunno what he looked like. Wouldn't take his cloak off. It's not unusual," he defended at the five stunned looks directed at him. "Yeh get a lot o' funny folk in the Hog's Head – that's one of the pubs down in the village. Mighta bin a dragon dealer, mightn' he? I never saw his face, he kept his hood up."

And again with the hooded figure; Harry was starting to get the worst feeling in his stomach.

"What did you talk to him about, Hagrid? Did you mention Hogwarts at all?"

"Mighta come up," Hagrid admitted, frowning as he tried to remember. "Yeah... he asked what I did, an' I told him I was gamekeeper here. He asked a bit about the sort creatures I look after... so I told him... an' I said what I'd always really wanted was a dragon... an' then... I can't remember too well, cause he kept buyin' me drinks... Let's see... yeah, when he said he had the dragon egg an' we could play cards fer it if I wanted... but he had ter be sure I could handle it, he didn' want it ter go ter any old home... So I told him, after Fluffy, a dragon would be easy..."

"And did he seem interested in Fluffy?" Ron asked, voice shaking a little.

"Well, yeah, how many three-headed dogs d'yeh meet, even around Hogwarts. So I told him, Fluffy's a piece 'o cake if yeh know how to calm him down, jus' play him a bit o' music an' he'll go straight off ter slee–"

Horrified, he fell silent, and Harry couldn't but inhale sharply at that. All this time, they'd thought it was safe, but the thief had gotten the information they'd needed months ago!

"I shouldn'ta told yeh that!" Hagrid blurted out, getting to his feet. "Forget I said it, Har– hey, where're yeh goin'?"

But Harry had already sprinted back, his friends in tow – he needed to find Dumbledore and tell him this; no matter whether Hagrid was his friend or not, this was bigger than that. Dumbledore needed to know that at least some of the protections were already as good as disarmed.

"Where are you going, Harry?" Hermione asked, breathing heavily as she came to a stop next to him.

"To find Dumbledore. He needs to know about this."

"Do you know how to get to his office?"

"Yeah, I– no, wait, it's probably moved by now again, and I don't know where it might be."

"Let's go find Professor McGonagall, then," she decided, the one to tug on his arm this time.

"Wait, is she coming _with_ us?" Seamus asked, a little loudly.

"I know most of it anyway," she pointed out with a look. " _And_ , I helped you figure out what it is that's on the third floor, _and_ I helped you with this, too."

"It's fine," Harry decided, looking around for a prefect or a professor. "She can st–"

"What is going on here, Mr Potter?" McGonagall's voice rang out, startling them all rather badly. At least she appeared to be in a congenial mood this time, carrying a large pile of books and observing them with simple curiosity, rather than anything else.

"We need to see Gr– Dumbledore," Harry told her. "Do you know where the office entrance is?"

" _Professor_ Dumbledore," she corrected with a look. "And why?"

Er... right, he couldn't very well tell _her_ , could he?

"It's... sort of secret."

"Good going, mate," Ron murmured the moment McGonagall's nostrils flared.

"I see. Well, Professor Dumbledore left fifteen minutes ago. He received an urgent owl from the Ministry of Magic and left for London at once."

" _Now_?" Harry yelped, staring at her.

"Professor Dumbledore is a very great wizard, Potter, he has many demands on his time–"

"Yes, I understand that, but–"

"Maybe you can help us," Hermione got involved. "It's about the Philosopher's Stone–"

Harry didn't know what she expected, but this certainly wasn't it; McGonagall let the books tumble out of her hands in shock as she stared at all of them.

"How do you know–" she spluttered.

"When will he be back?" Ron asked.

"Tomorrow," she said after a moment of silence.

"Don't you see," Harry said almost frantically, "this is just like the Troll Incident! It's a diversion, so that the thieves could get to it without Dumbledore catching them in the act!"

"Now, Potter, I don't know how you found out about the Stone, but rest assured, no one can possibly steal it, it's too well protected."

"But Professor, the wards are down!"

Hermione gasped; Ron, Seamus and Dean stared at him in alarm; McGonagall, however, frowned and shook her head.

"Potter, the wards aren't down. I've checked them personally fifteen minutes ago, when Professor Dumbledore left."

"But–"

"Professor Dumbledore would _know_ , Potter, if the wards had been taken down without his express permission," she spoke over him before he could get another word out, "to say nothing of their complexity, because Professor Dumbledore put them up _himself_."

"But–"

"You must have been mistaken, child. Now, I suggest you go to dinner and forget about this," she instructed, waving her wand to gather the books back into her hands and glaring at them until they were forced to slink way.

"It's going to happen today," Harry said grimly the moment they were out of her sight. "This is what we've been waiting for, and now Dumbledore is gone before we can warn him."

"But Harry, she said–"

"I know what she said, but I also know that I got into that corridor just fine half an hour ago," he interrupted her. "I don't know what's going on, but something _is_ , and now that we know Hagrid's also given up the information–"

"What about the other defences? Hagrid's can't be the only one, can it?"

"No, all the Heads of Houses and Quirrell and Dumbledore also put theirs."

"So why would you think that whoever's trying to steal it has gotten past _all_ of those other ones, too? Did you go around asking the other teachers like you asked Hagrid?"

"We tried, but they got immediately suspicious so we gave up on it," Dean volunteered.

"But that doesn't matter, does it; the wards being down means they've already gotten all the information they needed."

"But the wards _aren_ _'_ _t_ down, Professor McGonagall said so!"

"Fine; if I'm wrong, then we'll just end up wasting some time, will we," he told her, rolling his eyes at her naiveté.

"What are you going to do, then?" Hermione asked with a worried frown.

"We're going to keep an eye on that corridor, and if anyone shows up, we're going to stop them from going through," Harry decided. "Granger, I think you should–"

"What, let you do this?" she asked, eyes widening in disbelief. "This is _dangerous_! You might get killed!"

"Do you have any better suggestions?"

"Yes, find someone else who'd believe you!"

"Like who? McGonagall is the Deputy Headmistress as well as our Head of House; Dumbledore's gone, she's in charge, and all the other professors have to listen to her."

"But you can't just be going heedlessly into–"

"Hermione, it's Voldemort," he told her harshly, and she gasped. "The thieves are Death Eaters, and the person who attacked me in the Forest is Voldemort, ok? That's why I _know_ she's wrong; it doesn't matter if Gramps is the one who put up the wards if it's Voldemort who's after the Stone, and it _is_! I can't just let them get the Stone and bring him back! This is what I've always been meant to do, stop him, ever since he went after my parents and gave me this scar. You may not have any idea how it was the last time, but _we_ sure do, and I'm not going to just stand here and let one snitty witch stop me from preventing that!"

"You don't, either!" she exclaimed. "You were just a baby when it stopped, and I may not have heard about it second-hand, but I read plenty, and I know just how horrible it was! That still doesn't mean that you shouldn't try everything else before going to stop him yourself."

"Look, if I promise to speak to some of the other professors I know did the protections, will you lay off?" he asked, suddenly regretting having involved her from the start.

"Are you going to keep that promise?"

"I'm making it, aren't I?"

She glared at him, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Fine. Don't be stupid about it, though, all right?"

"I won't."

With a nod, she turned and marched away from them, and the moment she was far enough away that she couldn't hear them, Ron turned to Harry with a frown.

"You're not actually going to be asking anyone else, are you? Because I don't think we'll have a snowball's chance in hell of getting to the third floor if you did."

"Of course I won't," Harry confirmed. "And I didn't actually make the promise, did I? I just implied I was in the process of making it."

"Oh... wow, that's... that's actually smart."

"Well, when you live with two Marauders and you're a not that good at lying, you learn to fib," he said with a shrug. "Now, come on, we've got to hurry."

"How did you know the wards are down, anyway?"

"Fred and George, when they kidnapped me, they pulled me into the forbidden corridor. Dumbledore's just left, there's no way Regulus and Snape's father would have tried to get in until they were sure he's gone, so if we hurry, we can intercept them."

"It's dinnertime," Seamus pointed out. "No way is anyone sneaking in until after everyone's in the Great Hall."

"Which gives us just enough time to get into positions."

* * *

To say that Evan received glares from his housemates when Hermione marched into their Common Room was an understatement; jumping off the couch, Evan hurried to pull her into a corner, glaring back at some of the other Slytherins – while bringing students of other houses by from time to time wasn't frowned upon, per se, giving them the password definitely was. Evan, having thoroughly enjoyed himself in the Ravenclaw Tower, had wanted to show her around the Slytherin Dungeons and so had told her the password for these last two weeks, which was how she'd just now gotten in.

"I thought we agreed tomorrow," he said quietly to her, frowning when he noticed how agitated she looked. "What's going on, Mi?"

"Harry and his group are going after the Stone, right now," she whispered, looking around. "And we need to stop them."

"Wait, what?"

"Harry's convinced that it's Voldemort that's–"

"Don't use that name here," he interrupted her, wincing at her casual use of You-Know-Who's name and instinctively looking about for eavesdroppers; it wasn't a name openly used in this part of the castle, but of course, Hermione wouldn't know that. "Anywhere else, but not here," he added pre-emptively when he saw her gearing up for a pointless, time-wasting argument.

"Oh, all right. He's convinced that it's _You-Know-Who_ that's after the Stone, and Professor Dumbledore's gone from the school until tomorrow. I tried to get him to change his mind, but he was in a hurry to get rid of me, so he tried to convince me that he'd promised to speak to other professors. But I know he didn't – he's really much worse at manipulation than you are, I spotted it a mile away – which means that he and his friends are going to be doing something very, very stupid as soon as they can get away with it."

"And you think this is our chance of catching them in the act?" he asked for clarification, as this seemed like exactly the sort of opportunity he and Hermione had talked about on the train in January.

"Yes, now come on."

Huffing, Evan checked that he had his wand with him, before casting a look around the room.

"Gimme a sec; I need to find Stheno first, and besides, it's just about time for dinner, that means the hallways will be _filled_. No one will be sneaking into that corridor in the next hour or so."

"Stheno?" she asked, frowning, as she followed after Evan, who was hurrying back to his dorm room, where he'd last seen his Kneazle snoozing away.

"Interesting facts – Animagi can more easily communicate with animals than normal wizards can, and Stheno has the advantage in this equation of being a magical creature," he answered, bursting into his dorm and striding to his bed while Hermione glanced around the room, no doubt comparing it to her own dormitory. He picked up the Kneazle into his arms and they walked back out, deciding that the smartest thing to do was hide out near the Great Hall entrance and observe the flow of students until they got their chance to sneak up to the forbidden third floor corridor.

They spent the next half-hour in a charged state of expectance, talking in hushed tones about the whole Philosopher's Stone deal in order to be certain they'd not missed anything. Hermione explained Potter's reasoning for it being You-Know-Who, and things really did seem to be connecting best in that context, what with the unicorn blood and all, and it was making Evan quite antsy.

"The only thing we never figured out was who was behind it all," Hermione said in the end. "I mean, Voldemort for certain is involved, but he has to be working through someone at the school, right? I mean, he can't have just waltzed into the school, can he?"

"I don't think so; if he needs unicorn blood to survive, I really can't imagine him being able to combat all the protections."

"So who?"

Evan tried to think of someone who'd fit the requirements for the position of the spy, but while he could easily debate individuals, trying to come up with someone on the spot was another matter entirely. In the end, he was forced to shrug. "I suppose we'll know tomorrow, when the professors catch them in the act."

Finally, they deemed it safe to sneak up. They took the most direct route that also allowed them to hide from prying eyes as much as possible – it wouldn't do for Potter and his gang to catch them prematurely, after all. They'd never attempted to enter it, of course, but Evan had heard from some of the more adventurous Slytherins that there were some sort of wards placed on the whole section of the castle, and so expected it to be much harder to get to than simply walking it.

"Something's wrong," he warned Hermione, placing Stheno onto the ground and sneaking closer to the door that stood between them and the Cerberus. "We got all the way here way too easily."

"Oh, Merlin, he was right," she whispered. "Harry, he insisted the wards were down, but Professor McGonagall said that she'd checked them right before we ran into her and that they were fine, that they're too complex for anyone to dismantle without Professor Dumbledore knowing."

"Maybe it was tampering instead. I bet there was a restriction for underage magicals, to keep the students out, and someone messed with only that part," Evan suggested. "McGonagall might not have noticed something like that. I just can't figure out why someone would–"

Hermione gasped. "To get Harry in! I _knew_ someone's been trying to kill him all year; I bet this is another attempt!" She squared her shoulders, now doubly determined, while Evan's stomach dropped at the thought of someone trying to murder a child, even if that child was Harry bloody Potter.

"I think you were right; it _is_ happening now," he whispered at her, swallowing past his suddenly dry throat.

"I do, too. If they come, it'll be from the other side; that's closer to the Gryffindor Tower. Hey, is that music?"

Concentrating, Evan tried to hear what she meant, and after a moment managed to catch the sound of a harp playing. That just confirmed it; someone was already here.

"We should–"

But, before he could say anything, clumsy footsteps echoed from the other end of the corridor, walking towards them. Potter's little group of Junior Marauders – really, whoever came up with that name ought to be hanged, and hanged _good_ – was already here; he and Hermione had not planned on that.

"What do we do?" she hissed, grabbing onto his arm a little too tightly.

"We stick to the plan – inform McGonagall and get her to deal with them," Evan replied, bending down to his Kneazle, who looked up at him with those large knowing blue eyes. He ran his hand down her rich fur and give her short, direct instructions to get help from her favourite Animagus, not Mrs Norris. She was off like a speed demon the moment he finished speaking.

"That was when we thought we'd have time for Stheno to get the message to her," Hermione argued, moving to kneel down by his side so that she could whisper in his ear. "By the time she comes, they'll have already done whatever they're planning!"

"And your suggestion, then, Hermione?" Evan hissed back, heart speeding up in his chest and instinctive thoughts of just letting the little buggering idiots be eaten by the damn dog rising to the surface of his slowly panicking mind. But that music meant the dog was asleep, which meant Potter was not going to hesitate in going further – and what if Hermione was right and there was a Death Eater waiting for the idiot at the end of the tunnel? She was right, too, in that they didn't, in fact, have the time they thought they would to get McGonagall, and without that, this was turning into a completely different kind of mission.

"We have to stop them from trying to go down," she decided, standing up straight.

"If you haven't noticed, there's four of them."

"If we take them by surprise, we can overpower them and then call for help."

"Since when are you willing to hex other students?" he asked, looking at her rather incredulously.

"Since they're going to get _killed_. Come on, Evan, we can't just let them do it!"

"Hermione, they're more likely to get disabled by the protections than they are to get to the Stone and whoever's trying to steal it," he countered. "Those protections can't have been set up to seriously harm, because Dumbledore would have wanted the thief caught and questioned. And stopping them so that they'd get in trouble for doing something this idiotic is one thing, but you're talking about _helping_ them! _Saving_ them from their own idiocy! Again! Harry bloody Potter and his band of cronies, who've been the bane of my existence this year!"

"Yes!" she hissed back. "Yes, I am, because this is bigger than your conflict. This is their _lives_! _You_ were the one who told Tracey off for wanting to let him fall off the broom! This is the same thing."

"No, it's not. He wasn't the one putting himself in danger that time, he was being attacked. This time, he's doing it purposefully, so that everyone would be impressed with him and he could say that he's thwarted You-Know-Who again."

"If you don't want to do this, so help me, I'm using my last _Defer_ , which I'd rather not do. I know you're better than that pettiness, Evan! You're the only Slytherin who is, and I don't want to be disappointed in you."

Sometimes, when dealing with his decidedly growing female part of the small populace he termed 'friends', he wondered if it was just him, the Snape men in particular, or males in general who allowed themselves to be emotionally manipulated and blackmailed in this way. Sighing in resignation, he nodded.

"Fine," he muttered in bad grace, pulling out his wand. Giving him a bright, if tense, smile, Hermione did the same, and together, they snuck closer to the forbidden door. They both took a moment to catch their breath and listen to the clumsy footsteps – it seemed like Potter's group had entered the third floor on the other side, though there was nothing visible.

"How in the world–"

"Maybe some sort of invisibility cloak," Hermione suggested, and Evan huffed; it would be just like that prat, and it would also explain some of their sudden attacks on him that he'd not seen when he should have. Biting his lip, Evan inspected the hall and the door on the opposite wall. If he could trip them somehow – he was very certain all four idiots had decided to go, and there was no way they would all be comfortable under one invisibility cloak – he and Hermione might just have a shot at this. If he was very careful, he thought he could catch them by surprise quite easily.

"Ok, Hermione, get ready. Once I trip them, you have to cast a stunning spell or something immediately, otherwise they'll shoot back, and they are both very fast and very good at aiming."

"Right," she agreed, looking at the same time jittery and determined, her rare Gryffindor bravery coming out. He nodded once, then crept to the other side of the hallway, directly to the side of the slightly ajar door. Peering inside, he was unsurprised to find the dog sleeping, a harp playing lightly to the side, giving an explanation as to where that music was coming from. Would the Stone be safe form the thief? Well, he had great respect for and trust in Dumbledore, and this was undoubtedly his idea from the start, so he had to have set up some sort of defence himself, which meant that the Stone had to be safe. While his Slytherin side told him not to trust in just the man's reputation, it was still preferential to letting four untrained eleven-year-olds go barging into who knew what kind of danger beyond this point (especially if You-Know-Who was behind this, which Evan was pretty sure was the case).

When the footsteps appeared to be some ten feet from him, he pointed his wand at the source of the sound and whispered ' _Locomotor Mortis_ '.

The sight that followed would be considered as one of his fondest of memories until he died.

The curse hit one of the boys – he'd later learn it was Seamus Finnigan – while he was mid-stride, and, having lost his balance quite unexpectedly, he tumbled to the ground, pulling the other three boys with him. In the middle of their fall, the invisibility cloak fell off partly, making the sight truly only a tangle of various limbs with different-coloured sleeves and shoes. Their heads, however, still remained covered, so it was quite difficult to differentiate between them.

Then one of them shot up from the mess like he was on fire, and a wand tip appeared in thin air.

" _Petrificus Totalus_!" Hermione cried out in the next moment, aiming towards where a body should have been, in the same moment Evan jumped to the side to avoid the other boy's _Tarantallegra_. Unfortunately, he'd misjudged his dive, and only when he'd landed, rather painfully, on his side, did he realise he was in the room with the three-headed dog. He tried to scramble to his feet, very aware of just how vulnerable his position was, with his back turned to the fray.

" _Petrificus Totalus_!"

" _Colloshoo_!"

Judging from the fact that he found himself prostrate on the floor in the next second, the Stickfast Hex was aimed at him. Moments later, he heard a thump from the other side of the corridor, which meant that Hermione had not been able to dodge the curse, and someone muttering angrily: "Knew we shouldn't have trusted her, the Snake lover."

Weasley and Potter appeared above him.

"You're insane if you think you can stop us from stopping You-Know-Who!"

Evan wanted to roll his eyes at Weasley's awkward sentence structure, but he settled on yelling at them instead.

"You idiot, I don't want him back any more than you do!"

"Then wha–"

Potter cut his sentence short when he heard hurried footsteps from down the corridor. Good, that meant Stheno had found Professor McGonagall. Only then did the silence in the room register.

"Shit," he breathed out, pushing to his knees. "Potter, unstick me!"

"Why should I?" the other black-haired boy asked, somewhat haughtily. "You and the little Ravenclaw traitor cursed two of my friends."

"Harry..." Weasley cut through his angry words, eyes wide and glued to behind Evan, who would have closed his eyes and groaned in exasperation if he wasn't stiff with fear. The damn dog was nearly breathing down his neck. Potter's eyes widened as well once he realised what was going on. He whirled in his spot, inspected the hallway, looked down at his left hand, in which his invisibility cloak and a flute lay, turned back to the progressively angrier dog, looked down at Evan, turned back to the trapdoor, then seemed to come to a decision.

"You're coming with us," he said, yanking Evan's shoulder nearly out of its socket as he ran to the open trapdoor, Weasley, stupid too-trusting Gryffindor that he was, grabbing hold of Evan's other arm. They fell through the door just as a massive head descended to bite the air they'd previously occupied, and when Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick arrived not three minutes later, they found a temporarily petrified Hermione Granger and Dean Thomas, a Leg-Locked Seamus Finnigan, an irate three-headed dog, and a pair of shallow leather boots stuck to the floor near the entrance into the room.

* * *

"You are damn insane, Potter!" the Slytherin snarled as soon as they plopped down onto something soft and squishy. Harry rolled his eyes and tried to, at the same time, keep his wand aimed at the little loiterer and stash the now useless flute he'd gotten from Hagrid and his Cloak of Invisibility away. Snape held his wand aimed at Harry, as well, but with Ron by his side, there was little question in Harry's mind as to how this would turn out.

"What's this stuff?" Ron asked, his own wand lifted, but the other hand touching around on the plant that had served for a soft landing.

"Dunno, some sort of a plant thing," he replied, not daring to look at his best friend. "I suppose it's here to break the fall. We must be miles under the school."

"Don't be ridiculous; we'd be dead if it was miles. It's probably a floor or two, some hidden mid-level or something," the Slytherin answered with a condescending sneer in his voice. The next moment, he was on his feet, standing before them. Ron tried to do the same, without nearly as much success. A moment later, he'd plopped back down next to Harry, and only then did Harry realise his legs were encased with thick snake-like tendrils that had to be the plant's branches. He tried to wiggle free, only for it to react more violently, pulling on his right arm, which he savagely fought to keep straight.

Before them, Snape stood with a satisfied smirk on his face, observing the two.

"You know, you're going to die there," he pointed out, looking so very smug about it. "That's Devil's Snare, and you're not getting out of it like that any time soon. We learned about it this year in Herbology. Too bad that particular subject is beneath your sphere of divine interest."

"You bastard," Ron growled out, ending in a cough as the tendril wrapped around his throat. "I knew... you were... just like... all Slytherin."

"Screw you, Weasley," Snape replies, scoffing. "You didn't waste one opportunity to attack me this school year, and now I'm stuck in this freaking place because of you, so why should I do anything to help you?"

"You said you didn't want Voldemort to come back, either," Harry said, nearly pleading, thinking of ways to convince the boy to help them out. It was obvious he had to outthink the Slytherin, but that was proving rather hard with the damn plant trying to squeeze him to death. "So what were you doing here just now?"

In response, Snape groaned, his shoulders slumping. "Damn that girl," he muttered, before straightening back up and crossing his arms. "I'm not letting you out until I get assurances – as worthless as they are – that you two aren't going to be hexing and cursing me while we get back up."

"We're here to stop Voldemort, you bastard!" Harry shouted back at him, breathing as deeply as he could through his slowly constricting airway. "We can't go back!"

"Professor Dumbledore assured you the Stone is well guarded," Snape pointed out with a lift of his eyebrow.

"And you... think... that will stop... You-Know-Who?" Ron gasped beside him, his voice weak and listless enough Harry's fear and panic doubled.

"What do you two propose to do? You're eleven."

"I stopped him when I was a baby."

"Yes, and that makes you the infallible, invincible Merlin-come-again Potter," Snape drawled, lifting his head to look over his large nose at them. Beside him, Ron was struggling for every breath, and by now, Harry was frantic. "However _could_ anyone think Dumbledore smarter or more powerful than you?"

"It's going to kill him!" he screamed, though it sounded more like a pained gasp than anything else. " _Please!_ "

Snape, looking suddenly slightly shocked, blinked twice, before pointing his wand at the edge of the plant. " _Incendio_."

Red flames burst at the edges of Devil's Snare, which seemed to shrivel back into itself in the next moment, giving Harry and Ron enough wiggle-room to get out – or, as the case were, for Harry to get out and then pull Ron with him, the other boy too busy coughing to do it himself.

"You really are a right bastard, aren't you, Snape?" Harry spat, looking contemptuously at the other boy, who was twirling his wand in his hand, looking completely unaffected by the event. "That thing had nearly killed us!"

"I warned you, didn't I? I specifically said 'you're going to die there'."

"So what, you're going to gloat about it now?"

"You know, I really do want to," Snape confirmed. "It would be a rather nice vindication for you _targeting me every damn week_ with your _pranks_ and your _bullying_ , for no freaking reason I can think of! The Great Harry Potter, the saviour of the wizarding world, nearly killed by a Devil's Snare, and saved by none other than a greasy Slytherin kid who's been his target for months."

"Oh, you had it coming, just like your turncloak father did, back when Dad and Sirius were in school. You Snapes are all the same."

"Don't presume to know me, _Potter_ ," Snape spat out, green eyes blazing in the light of the dying flames. "I'm not the bully here."

"You sure are not the victim, either," Ron pointed out, hand clenched tightly around his wand. "You sent Seamus to the hospital wing for three days, or don't you remember?"

"As if I'm going to let you bully me my whole life, Weasley. I can dish out everything you can and more, so do try, I dare you, to do something to me now. I'll be the one laughing when You-Know-Who gets to you at the end of this little _adventure_."

"No," Harry said forcefully, glancing up at the trapdoor. By now the professors had to have arrived. "No, you're coming with us, or I'll hex you so bad, your own mother won't recognise you."

"Like you could," Snape sneered haughtily.

"Try me," Harry replied, giving his voice a hard edge, and trying to stare down those green eyes. "Because this will work only if you think you can take both of us at the same time, two-on-one, in the open, without any of your usual Slytherin tactics."

The other boy remained disdainful, but Harry could see the wheels turning behind those green eyes, and could even pinpoint the moment the other boy realised he was right, there was no way he could take on both Harry and Ron at the same time, and still come out on top.

"Tell me, Potter, is it your pride or your arrogance that makes you think you can stop something if Dumbledore had failed? Or to presume that you'd do a better job at it than the professors just up there?"

"I tried telling her," he replied, defending his actions. "I told McGonagall it's going down tonight, when Dumbledore isn't in the castle, but she wouldn't listen. And if I let her catch up to me here, then she'll just force us to go back and not even bother to check."

"Because you being able to get this far doesn't raise any flags, or that harp up there, as a matter of fact? Potter, the wards have been tampered with! Of course she'd make sure we're not the only ones down here!"

"Like she made sure when I told her in the first place? As angry as she is with us, she'd probably accuse us of doing it ourselves!"

"That's patently untrue. No, this is about you wanting to play the hero, Potter. I didn't think you were such a coward to hide behind weak justifications like _that_."

"Even if it is, what's it to you?" Ron cut in, snorting. "Haven't you _just_ said you'd love to see us dead?"

"You're right, Weasley, you're absolutely right. You go on ahead, and I'm washing my hands of this thing."

"Oh, no you're not," Harry jumped in. "It's your damn fault the teachers are after us. If we get in trouble for this, so will you," he ground out, just as McGonagall's voice rose from up above.

"Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, Mr Snape! You are to stay exactly where you are until we come get you! Is that clear?!"

"Sorry, Professor, but we have to stop him before he gets the Stone!" Harry yelled back up, squinting as he tried to differentiate her form.

"Potter, you are to do as I say!"

"This is life and death, I'm going forward!" he yelled back, grabbed hold of the other two boys' upper arms, and pulled them down the passageway towards the door at the far end. His irate professor's voice was firmly shut out the moment he closed the door behind them, too well for it to have been nearly because of it. When he tried to open it again, it wouldn't budge.

"Typical," Snape snorted, shaking his head. "Goddamn bloody Gryffindors. Always rushing into things."

"Oh, shut your mouth," Ron snapped at him. "No one asked you to try and stop us up there in the first place."

"Yeah, well I also didn't ask to go on with you, now did I?!"

That was true, of course, but Harry wasn't dumb enough to ignore the fact that Evan Snape had saved their lives just now, and that if they ever needed a bookish brain again, their best bet, after Hermione, would be the Slytherin. Of course, he'd sooner die than admit to ever needing help from Snape, but that was another point altogether. To be fair, as far as Slytherins went, Harry would choose Snape over Malfoy any day. At least Snape didn't rub everyone's nose in with his own wealth and family position. As much as it hurt him to even think it, Snape had some redeeming qualities, whereas Malfoy really had none.

"You think those will attack us?" Ron asked, pulling his attention towards a flock of birds of some kind, if he was interpreting the rustling and clinking. Pushing off the door, Harry peered up through his glasses, trying to figure out what kind of danger they'd represent. He had half a mind that they'd just swoop down and peck them to death or something.

Beside him, Ron walked gingerly over to the other door and pulled. Nothing happened, which made him frown, turn back to inspect the door against which Snape was still leaning, then look up at the birds.

"Does anyone know unlocking spells?"

"Don't tell me you haven't mastered a simple _Alohomora_ , Weasley," Snape commented, lifting his eyebrow.

"Oh, sod off, Snape. Harry?"

"Yeah," Harry agreed distractedly, half his mind engaged in trying to figure out what kind of weird security measures these were. He crossed the room and attempted the spell, but the door stayed firmly locked. "Now what?"

"Well, these things aren't here to make the room pretty," Snape pointed out, green eyes upturned towards the flock of birds. Once again, Harry raised his eyes towards them, studying the flickering of their wings and the glittering of their golden b– _glittering_?

"They're not birds! They're keys! Winged keys. So that must mean..." And sure enough, in the corner of the room were several brooms, leaning against the wall. "...Yes, look! Broomsticks. We've got to catch the keys to the door."

"But there are _hundreds_ of them!" Ron complained, before frowning and turning to the door lock. "Ok, we're looking for a big, old-fashioned one – probably silver, like the handle."

Harry turned his eyes back to the Slytherin, who had by now already lifted his hands in the air, wand still loose between the fingers of his left one. "I'm not the youngest Quidditch player in a century," he said with a sneer. "I'm sure you can handle this."

"Oh, so you can hex us while we're in the air, is that it? No, you're helping us with this. Saddle up."

" _Saddle up?_ What are we, in a Muggle Western film?"

"Oh, would you stop complaining already?!" Ron groaned, rolling his eyes.

"Why should I? I'm not here of my own volition, I have a right to express my displeasure."

"Do you want me to stick your tongue to the roof of your mouth?" Harry challenged, looking at him over his glasses. The other boy sighed, shook his head, then pocketed his wand and approached them.

"Not that I believe you can, Potter, but I'd rather not be stuck in a room with two locked doors and no way out. You're the flying expert, what do we do?"

"Well, see, you first need to put the broom on the ground, hold your hand over it, then–"

"Don't be an idiot, Weasley," the Slytherin hissed, glaring daggers at Ron. "You can't just go flying into that flock of keys and expect the right one to glide over to you and say 'oh, we're supposed to be the protection for the Philosopher's Stone, but since you're so nice and ginger, I'll let you just take me and stick me in the lock to go on through'. You need a bloody strategy, and as far as I know, Potterprat over here is the only one who's on a Quidditch team."

"Let's first find the right one, then we'll figure out how to corner it," Harry said, trying for conciliatory and wondering why in the world Hermione always insisted this guy was quiet and polite. He did nothing but spit vitriol at them every time Harry saw him.

Three minutes later, Harry finally spotted the key they needed, a large silver one, with its wing already bent, no doubt by whomever had gone on ahead.

"That one!" he yelled, pointing it out to the other two boys. "That big one, there – no, there, with bright blue wings. The feathers are all crumpled on one side!"

Ron seemed to be the first to notice it, and he nodded, looking expectantly at Harry. The key, for the moment, was hovering somewhere between the three of them, but Harry knew from experience it won't be for much longer. He had to figure out where the key would fly, then intercept it.

"All right. Ron, you come at it from above; Snape, stay below and stop it from going down; I'll pin it to the wall. Ready? Now!"

As he'd expected, the moment the other two boys started flying towards it, the key flew to the side away from Harry, in the direction of the wall. Whizzing past the other two boys, he chased after the key and, with a nasty crunching noise, pinned it to the wall, wrapping his fingers securely around the frantically flapping wings. Grinning madly, with Ron's cheers to back him up, Harry dismounted the broom and placed it back next to the others.

"Good job, mate!"

"Yeah, yeah, our very own Quidditch prodigy," Snape commented, rolling his eyes.

"Let's get a move on," Harry said, hoping to cut their argument short, very aware that the professors had to have gotten sufficient help to go after them by now. He stuffed the key into the lock and turned, letting the key fly out of his hand as the door opened.

Lights in the next chamber only came on when the three walked in and the door closed behind them, revealing a rather astonishing sight, a huge chessboard with enormous stone pieces – black in front, and white in back – without faces. The second door was behind the white pieces, on the other end of the chamber.

"Now what do we do?" Harry asked, blinking slightly to make sure he was actually seeing what he was seeing.

"It's obvious, isn't it?" Ron asked. "We've got to play our way across the room."

"Is common sense something only a select population of the wizarding world possesses, or are Gryffindors just that stupid?" Snape voiced, looking at them almost incredulously.

"And, what, pray tell, oh Lord of Grease, have we done _now_ to impress you so much?" Harry sneered right back.

"It's a room. With a high ceiling. There are brooms. For flying. _Right there_ ," he deadpanned, pointing back at the door. Wanting to hit himself on the head for his own stupidity – for what it was worth, Harry grew up with Sirius Black, who, to be fair, wasn't one for logical thinking most of the time – he turned back and pulled on the door.

Like the one before, this one was glued shut.

"Uh, I think all doors might have that spell on them," Ron noticed nervously. "Which means..."

"We're dead," Snape concluded, running a hand through his hair and suddenly looking unnerved. "Wonderful."

"What are you talking about?" Harry asked, frowning.

"Don't tell me you've never played wizarding chess, Potter."

"He's right," Ron said quietly, eyes flying over the board. "I bet there's no way we can just get around them..." and to demonstrate, he stepped to the side and forward, only to be immediately stopped by a very scary chess piece, "yeah, see? Which means we'll have to take places of some of the chessmen." He walked over to the black knight on the left and touched the knight's horse. In response, the figure seemed to come alive, horse neighing and pawing the ground, knight turning to look down at Ron. "Do we, er, have to join you to get across?"

The black knight nodded, and Harry's spirits sagged with it. He remembered quite well how violent wizarding chess was, but to him, it had always been funny, rather than terrifying. Brought to this scale, however, it was another thing entirely.

"This wants thinking about... I suppose we've got to take the place of three of the black pieces... All right, you two, I've got this."

"You've got this, Weasley?" Snape asked, sounding dubious.

"What, you can win the game, Snape?"

The boy looked uncomfortable, shifting on his feet. "I can _play_. Dad usually beats me, though."

"Mine hasn't beaten me in four years," Ron replied, though not smugly, Harry noticed. It seemed all three of them were shaken up by the idea of being a chess piece in wizarding chess.

"Ron's the best chess player in our dorm," Harry confirmed, feeling the need to justify his friend a bit. "If anyone can get us across, it's Ron."

"I don't see how we have much of a choice anyway," Ron pointed out, before turning to inspect the board again. "All right, I'll make this as short as possible. Harry, you take the place of that bishop, Snape, you go there instead of that castle, and I'll be that knight."

The chessmen seemed to have been listening, as, in the next moment, the three figures rose and walked off the board, leaving three empty squares for the three boys, who hesitantly took them.

"White always plays first in chess," Ron muttered, peering over the board. "Yes, look."

A white pawn had moved forward two squares.

"And so it begins," Harry agreed, taking a deep breath and focusing on the game.

* * *

Ron Weasley, for all his usual idiocy, was a master chess player, Evan decided as he watched his good friend's brother dart to take a white bishop. If push came to shove, Evan would have said he was decent at chess, and he'd had great doubts as to Weasley's prowess in the sport, but it seemed that for once, he'd been proven wrong.

The violence the white and black pieces exhibited was frightening, and each time another black piece got speared or destroyed in some other way, it only increased Evan's fear, for there were less and less of the black pieces to be taken, and that meant they were in greater and greater danger.

He'd managed to pre-emptively warn the redhead when someone was threatening him or Potter – self-preservation was a prized possession in Slytherin – but for the most part, the boy made moves that Evan didn't quite understand, which later paid off tenfold. How he had such foresight to think strategically ten steps ahead, when he usually blundered about and messed everything up in Potions, where he even had clear instructions, was beyond Evan, but he couldn't deny Weasley was saving their butts out here.

"We're nearly there," Weasley muttered, frowning as he scanned the board. Evan did the same, with a great big sinking feeling in his stomach as he realised exactly what move they could use to win. But there was no way. Of that, he was sure. "Let me think, let me think... Yes," the redhead said softly, nodding to himself. "Yes, it's the only way... I've got to be taken."

"No!" Harry shouted, at the same time Evan decided that was never going to happen.

"That's chess!" Ron snapped, looking suddenly too annoyed not to be covering up fear. "You've got to make some sacrifices! I'll make my move, and she'll take me – that leaves you free to checkmate the king, Harry!"

"But–"

"Weasley's right," Evan cut in, stunned beyond words and wondering if this was just Gryffindor stupidity or actual bravery. There was not one Slytherin in the Den of Snakes that would have sacrificed themselves in this way. "You insisted we had to move ahead. So either he makes his move and we win, he doesn't make the move and we stay stuck here until the professors come to rescue us, or he tries another strategy and we fail. I'm personally happy with the second option, but since you've made it clear you won't let us stop, I fail to see why you're suddenly so reticent."

"He's my best friend, Snape! Surely you have at least one of those. I'm not going to let him sacrifice himself–"

"Look, do you want to get to the Stone or not?" Weasley snapped back at Potter, sounding very exasperated. "I'll do this, and you two will go on ahead and stop You-Know-Who from getting the Stone, and that's it. Clear?"

Potter grumbled but settled down at that, and Weasley, after taking one last long breath, stepped forward. The white queen didn't waste a moment, her stone arm descending to clout Weasley about the head. Potter nearly jumped out of his skin, and Evan winced in sympathy. But, both boys stayed in their designated place until the white queen dragged Weasley off the board. Shaking at the sight, Potter nonetheless stepped three places to the left, and Evan thought 'check mate' as the white king threw his crown at Potter's feet.

In the next moment, the chessmen parted and bowed, opening up the pathway to the door. Potter looked about ready to run to his friend, but Evan caught him by the arm and dragged him towards the door, more than a little shaken up in spite of himself. Idiotic he may be, but no one could accuse Weasley of being either cowardly or disloyal.

"We need to move, Potter," he ground out as the door behind them shut closed, "before the pieces decide to set themselves back. The professors are behind us, they'll take care of him."

"Yeah... yeah, you're right. He'll be fine."

That wasn't exactly what Evan had said, but he let it slip.

"What do you recon's next?"

"Devil's Snare was Sprout's, and the keys were probably Flitwick's – Mum couldn't have done it better – McGonagall had to have transfigured the chessmen to that size, which leaves at least Slughorn's and probably also Quirrell's and Dumbledore's. Maybe some other professor, as well."

In their emotional upheaval, neither boy had noticed how congenial they'd become with one another, nor that Evan had stopped complaining about going back. In truth, he could quite understand right now why Gryffindors did all the stupid things they did. The brain puzzle this was turning into was exhilarating, and in spite of the violence he'd just witnessed, he was jittery to learn what was coming up ahead and whether he could figure out the other tests, as well.

A second door was before them, and Potter pushed it open with care. The smell that instantly wafted towards them was sickness-inducing, making both boys pull on their robes to try and breathe as their eyes watered. Considering the amount of time Evan usually spent with disgusting potion ingredients, this was saying something.

There, in front of them, lying on the floor, was a troll that had to be at least fifteen feet tall, out cold with a bloody lump on its head.

"I'm glad we didn't have to fight that one," Potter muttered, hurrying past. "Come on, I can't breathe."

They went through the next door and took a moment to clear their lungs and nasal passages, the scene just behind making Evan very, very uncomfortable as he came to a rather morose conclusion.

"Did you ever figure out who wanted to steal the Stone for You-Know-Who?"

"Why do you ask that?" Potter questioned, showing his suspicion.

"Because that troll had to be Quirrell's, and when else did you ever see a troll besides today?"

Comprehension dawned on Potter's face, and he cast an uneasy glance back at the room they'd just vacated.

"You think it's Quirrell?"

"Didn't you think it suspicious that he was the one who informed everyone about the troll in the middle of dinner and then fainted while everyone panicked? He was supposed to have things like those under control, that's why he's teaching Defence. And then, in a move of absolute, sheer imbecility, the Headmaster orders everyone out of the one room in which the troll obviously _isn_ _'_ _t_."

"Gramps is not an imbecile!" Potter exclaimed indignantly, to which Evan snorted.

"Of course he isn't. So why move everyone out, unless Grandpa wanted the diversion with the troll to work so that he could figure out who, exactly, wanted the Stone?"

"Grandpa? Wait, why–"

"Potter! Focus!" Evan barked, though his cheeks started heating up; Potter's casual use of the word had made him slip back into old habits, too, habits he'd done his best to stifle fully before coming to Hogwarts. Potter eyed him a moment, then exhaled loudly.

"You think it was Quirrell's idea from the start, to use that time to try and break into here?"

"Not unlikely. After all, he was one of the professors not immediately involved with either moving the students or searching for the troll, wasn't he, when he'd decided to take a kip on the floor. Who did you think was behind it?"

"Well, there were two people we were suspicious about. Regulus Black–"

"Mr Black?!" Evan breathed out in disbelief. "You thought _Mr Black_ was sneaking around the castle, working for You-Know-Who? You're as moronic as I thought, Potter."

"Regulus was a Death Eater," Potter pointed out, clenching his fists in anger. "He worked for Voldemort for years, and only got off on a technicality. Of course we were suspicious!"

"Do you think your guardian would have been friendly with his brother if the man was still working for You-Know-Who? Unless you've forgotten, Sirius Black was the, pun intended, black sheep of that family, precious Gryffindor who wouldn't be caught dead socializing with a Slytherin if his life depended on it. Yet he's on good terms with Regulus, from what I know, so why would he be if he didn't trust the man?"

"Yes, well, Sirius isn't perfect, and he sees what he wants to see. Regulus is his closest living relative."

With a roll of his eyes, Evan decided to let that story go.

"Ok, and who's the other person?"

"Your father," Potter admitted belligerently, making Evan splutter in indignation.

"What?! He's not trying to steal the Stone, you moron!"

"So you say. But what was he doing at Hogwarts all this time, then? Parents don't just come strolling around the school, checking in on their kids, or haven't you noticed that? Oh, right, he's your father."

It seemed that, unknowingly, Potter had stumbled upon and completely dismissed the true reason for Severus' visits. Evan was not going to be caught _dead_ admitting to more than he had to, though; it was bad enough that Malfoy and Zabini knew about his night terrors and separation anxiety. Giving _Potterprat_ that information was out of the question. Still...

"He _was_ , actually."

"Was what?"

"Coming to see me. He's teaching me Occlumency. Ask Gr– Dumbledore if you don't believe me; it was his idea in the first place. Besides, even if Regulus _was_ working for You-Know-Who, my father _definitely_ isn't, or have you forgotten that my mum's a Muggle-born?"

Potter didn't reply to it directly. Instead, he grunted and shook his head.

"He's a Slytherin; he could have married her as a ruse."

"As a r– _Are you out of your freaking mind?!_ " Evan screeched, finding himself wanting to punch the boy until his face was bloody. "My parents were best friends since they were kids, and my dad's been working with Grandpa since he was _fifteen_! Dumbledore's basically his adoptive father! As a ruse? My dad, a Death Eater? Are you _nuts_?!"

"Well, I didn't know that, did I?" Potter shot back sharply.

"Not that it would have made any difference to _you_ , would it, since my dad's a _Slytherin_! That's your stupid problem with me, isn't it, that I'm a Slytherin and I _like_ that I'm a Slytherin! Slytherins are automatically evil in your empty head! We couldn't _possibly_ be good guys, no matter what we do to prove our loyalty and beliefs! _That_ _'_ _s_ why you suspected your own uncle, isn't it? Because Regulus is a Slytherin like my dad! I bet that if you'd seen Remus Lupin doing suspicious things in the castle, you wouldn't have even thought to _think_ that he might be a traitor, would you, just because _he_ is a _Gryffindor_ , even though being a Dark creature is normally _just_ as damning as possibly having been a Death Eater!"

Potter went pale as chalk, blue eyes flying wide as he stared at Evan, and the greasy-haired boy blinked in momentary confusion that served well to knock him out of his righteous indignation and anger.

"You know about Remus?"

Evan frowned – did the boy think this was some big secret? The idiot.

"Lupin is my mum's best friend, and he's one of the ten most important people in the Werewolf Unionist Faction! Of course I know! _Everyone_ knows he's a sodding werewolf, Potter!"

Potter's mouth popped open, though no sound came out. Evan began sniggering – he couldn't help himself, he really couldn't, both because the boy in front of him was gaping like a fish out of water, and because of the fact he'd apparently not known this little detail – and that served to shake the Gryffindor out of his momentary shock.

"Oh, shut up, you greasy git," he growled. "We've no time for this."

"Just so long as you admit you were stupidly wrong about who's behind this," Evan replied.

"Fine; but even if I was wrong, that doesn't make _you_ right," Potter shot back, pride obviously smarting, though after a moment of tense silence, he relented a bit. "Though if it _is_ Quirrell, then he's definitely out to kill me," he said glumly. "Because we played that chess for quite a while, and the professors still haven't managed to catch up to us."

"To say nothing of the wards having been malfunctioning for hours, plenty of time for your nosy arse to notice," Evan had to agree, stomach cramping from nerves. "Yeah, they definitely wanted you here. It's a trap for you, Potter, as well as a theft."

"Right, but I still have to go forward," he said stubbornly, glaring at Evan. "So, are you coming with me or not?"

"You're just going to _walk_ in?"

"Yes, because it'll be a hundred times worse if Voldemort _gets_ the Stone, won't it? And they won't count on you being with me, either, nor on me knowing it's a trap. Now, come on, let's see about this protection," he said, walking up to the table with potion vials on them. "This one must be Slughorn's," he decided, picking up a piece of parchment from the table. The moment Evan pushed himself from the door to join him, though, a purple fire sprang up behind him, while black flames started licking at the door that led forward. So, either he'd be stuck here, or he'd be going forward; either way, his fate was all but sealed – as much as he hated the other boy, one thing was for certain, and that was that Voldemort _couldn_ _'_ _t_ be allowed to come back, not when Evan's mum was such a high-priority target of the Pure-blood elitist and had done so much to undermine everything Voldemort stood for. For her, he knew he would do anything, including walking into this trap with Potter.

"Let me see that," Evan instructed, and Potter handed it over with a frown. Scanning the parchment briefly made Evan blink in surprise. "What the..."

"What is it?"

"This isn't Slughorn's," he commented, eyes flying over the text.

"Of course it is, it's Potions. Who else does potions in here?"

"It's 'brew', not 'do' potions, Potter," Evan corrected him distractedly, looking from the parchment to the bottles and back again, already working through it. "And this is not Slughorn's handwriting, it's Dad's."

"Dad's?" Potter echoed in confusion. "As in, your dad did this?"

"Yes. He's the youngest Potions Master in the last three hundred years, and three times better than Horace Slughorn." And, of course, that explained his father's visit in November. "This was what he was working on for Dumbledore!" He read through the text again, cataloguing the most important information, comparing the description with the seven bottles. "Brilliant," he breathed out, grinning to himself like mad. "My dad's brilliant."

"And why's that?"

"Because this has nothing to do with magic, it's simple logic, an actual puzzle. Seventy five percent of wizards would just be stuck here, because they haven't a lick of common sense in their heads. Oh, this is rich. Ravenclaws are probably the only ones who could easily figure this one out." At that thought, his stomach dropped. "Quirrell is a Ravenclaw."

"Oh. Can you solve it?"

"Of course I can, Dad makes me solve these types of things all the time. Three poisons, two wine bottles, and two potions that actually work. Give me a minute."

 _Fourth, the second on the left and the second on the right_  
 _Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight_

That line was clear enough and either the poisons were identical, or those two were wine. Pulling them slightly towards himself, Evan looked back down at the paper.

 _First, however slyly the poison tries to hide_  
 _You will always find some on nettle wine's left side_

So, if the two were wine, then that meant the first and the fifth bottle were poisons. He pulled them out, inspected the colour of the liquid, trying to figure out if it was the same kind of poison. If he knew his dad – and that he did – then the poisons were all different to make it harder to find all three just by knowing one. Of course, that made is slightly easier on the whole, Evan thought, seeing how the only two identical could, therefore, actually be wine, but this wasn't designed to be unbeatable.

 _Second, different are those who stand at either end,_  
 _But if you want to move onwards, neither is your friend_

That was sure enough – the one on the left end was a poison. The one on the right was the largest of them all, and he set it apart slightly. The three unidentified bottles held poison and the two potions they needed to move either ahead or backwards, he just needed to figure out which one was which.

 _Third, as you see clearly, all are different size,_  
 _Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides_

Well, that sorted the thing right up, Evan thought happily. The only middle-sized bottle left had to be poison, and since the giant was at the right end of the row, it would lead back, while the little dwarf bottle would lead ahead.

Of course, there was the possibility that the first two bottles were poison, so he went through the puzzle in his head again, choosing to consider the two second-in-the-row bottles as poison; he came up with the same result, only the arrangement of the bottles was mirrored to the previous option. However he looked at it, the dwarf bottle would contain the potion to go ahead, though he knew he'd been right the first time; in the second option, one of the poisons would be in the giant bottle, and the last line of the puzzle contradicted that. Besides, if he'd gotten it wrong (and he _hadn_ _'_ _t_ ), then he was pretty sure the poisons wouldn't kill them. His father would want the culprit caught and interrogated, not outright killed.

"All right, got it," he said, grinning in satisfaction and thinking his dad, no matter how mad about this, would still be proud that he'd solved it this quickly. "The smallest bottle leads on ahead, through the black flames, and the big one on the right leads back." He unstoppered the littlest bottle, peering in. The potion was nearly gone, and while he couldn't identify it per se, he knew which group of potions it belonged to. "Damn, whoever took this really doesn't get the concept of potion effects," he muttered to himself, putting it down to inspect the other one. The aroma had a same tangy note to it that could be easily mistaken for wine, but that also marked this group of potions. "These are philtres, potions that charm the drinker, and these two must work on the same principle as the Flame-Freezing Charm, only they'd be much more specific and very complicated to make because of it."

"There's only enough for one of us in that one," Potter pointed out, looking at the smallest bottle.

"I think I understand just why Dad keeps saying Slughorn is a joke," Evan muttered, shaking his head. "No, these are as strong as Veritaserum when brewed correctly – and they have been brewed correctly, my dad's prepared them. Three drops will do. We won't be able to go _back_ , but they'll last the few second we need to get into the next chamber."

"But, who drank the rest of it, then?"

"Probably the idiot who can't differentiate between basic potions groups," Evan answered, shrugging his shoulders. "I mean, the idiot in question drank about a hundred times more of the potion than he needed. Unless they expected this whole thing to be a dead-end and didn't know how much time they'd need to break whatever's beyond, though I think in that case they should have simply taken the whole bottle with them."

"Yeah, but then how would I have gone through?" Potter pointed out. "Hm; maybe that's why he did it in the first place, so that there would only be enough for one person to go through, so that I'd not have any backup. Will that hurt him?"

"Not likely, just make him impervious to the black flames for a very long time. There's nothing inherently poisonous in most philtres, they're just very complicated to prepare. Polyjuice belongs to this general group, though it's not even close to these two. Their danger comes from their effects, it's very similar to overpowered charms that can cause harm, but I don't see how ingesting this specific philtre would be harmful. In any case, there should be at least one more obstacle ahead – we haven't encountered anything Dumbledore set up personally."

"So, does that mean you _are_ coming with me?

"Seeing how the whole point of me being in this mess was the promise I have given Hermione to stop you from getting killed, I can't very well stay here, now, can I? Besides, fat good you have out of knowing it's a trap if you just do whatever he wants you to anyway."

"Well, all right then; but only if you're sure," Potter said pointedly, and Evan actually took a moment to truly consider everything.

He was not exactly sure why he wanted to participate in the impending confrontation, aside from his concern for his mum and the promise he'd given to Hermione – Merlin only knew what she ever saw in these four idiots to want to willingly spend time with them – but he guessed part of the reason was the low boil of excitement mixed with a heavy dose of fear that made all his nerve fibres positively thrum with anticipation. He'd told Potter correctly, the potion would work to get them through, but there was no way the effects would last any prolonged dwelling in the room beyond. That meant they'd not be getting out of this trap by simply running away – he really hoped the professors had figured out a way of getting past those fused doors by now, because even if it was only stuttering, incompetent Quirrell, Evan wasn't certain they would be able to subdue him on their own, not when he was expecting them.

He nodded his confirmation.

"Ok, then we need a plan," Potter said resolutely. "How's your wand hand?"

"As good as it was an hour ago."

"All right, then. Let's get this circus on the road."

"Show, it's show," Evan corrected him with a roll of his eyes. Potter huffed a little at that, but outlined the basic plan they would be working with in short, precise sentences, and Evan had to admit it was the best option they'd have.

That done, Evan tipped the bottle carefully into Potter's mouth, letting three drops touch the boy's tongue, before downing out the rest – there wasn't much more than he'd given Potter. With a nod to each other, wands drawn, the two boys who, in another world, could have been one, walked through the black flames, to face the thief beyond.

* * *

Snape was right, the man after the Stone really was Quirrell. When they walked through the flames, the turbaned wizard was standing by a large mirror – a familiar-looking mirror at that – wand out, smiling, and not twitching at all.

Harry stepped into his role immediately.

"You!" he faked his shock, catching Snape stepping a little to the side.

"Me," he confirmed calmly. "I wondered if I'd be meeting you here, Potter. Did you notice the little spells I used on the door? Can't have anyone barging in, now, can we? I didn't think you'd bring a friend, and a Slytherin to boot, but I suppose it makes no difference."

"And what about..."

"Black? Oh, he really helped me sell it, coming in at all hours, lurking about the castle, trying to feel me out. And Snape, of course, showing up in all the wrong places just when I seem to have _you_ nicely in hand. To think, all I needed to do was become p-p-poor st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell!"

"But then, at that Quidditch game..."

"Yes, yes, that was me, I tried to kill you. And I'd have done it too, if not for Snape muttering counter-curses the whole time. His little clone and that Ravenclaw twit were the ones who saved your hide, Potter, you should thank them. If they hadn't broken my concentration when they did, I'd have gotten you thrown off that br–"

Snape's spell would have been dead on, had the professor not caught the flash of its reflection in the mirror. As it was, Quirrell jerked to the side, breaking off mid-sentence, which Harry used to cast a _Petrificus Totalus_ , while Snape followed up his first attempt with the Dancing Feet Spell.

The professor was too fast; one sweeping wave had both spells ricocheting off a shimmering blue shield. A flick, and thick ropes sprang out of thin air before either boy could react, wrapping themselves tightly around them, their wands clattering to the floor. Another flick, and the wands sailed through the air into his waiting hand. Damn, Harry thought, they'd just lost their main weapons in addition to being restrained. He should have known the bugger had been pretending to be incompetent all along. Dread began pooling in his stomach. He should have known that it wouldn't be that easy.

"Nice try, Mr Snape," Quirrell said, looking at the other boy. "Unfortunately, your situational awareness really requires work."

"It didn't during the Quidditch game," Snape shot back. "I stopped you from harming Potter just fine."

"Yes, unfortunately," the man allowed. "But only because the jinx I was attempting required constant eye-contact. You would never have succeeded otherwise."

"What did you do?" Harry asked, bewildered, looking at his companion, who was sporting two red spots high on his cheeks.

"Well, Hermione and I figured someone was trying to throw you off, but we weren't sure who, and from where we were sitting, we couldn't see anyone but Dad keeping eye-contact with you."

"So, that flare of green light..." Harry finished with dawning comprehension.

"Yes, that was Hermione and me. We couldn't make _him_ suspicious, but we had to make him stop looking at you. So we blinded everyone in the professor and guest stands."

Frowning, Harry looked back at Quirrell, who'd turned again to the mirror. He took a moment to study it and only then realised with an unpleasant jolt that, of course he knew it, when he'd gotten a cold sitting in front of it – The Mirror of Erised. And no doubt Quirrell was mad enough to wish the Stone most in the world.

He needed to distract him, now.

"And what about the Aurors? Did you think no one would notice someone trying to kill me?"

Quirrell grunted at that.

"I admit I'd not anticipated that much of a scrutiny; they were quite obviously superficial in their investigation of the troll, after I killed it."

Harry snorted. "Idiot; I live with an Auror, and I'm the Boy-Who-Lived. And you tried to kill me very publically; of course they were going to investigate."

"It was an excellent plan, and they wouldn't have even known it was a targeted attack if it wasn't for _that one_ _'_ _s_ father figuring out it was Dark magic and trying to counteract it!"

"Wait. Snape, your Dad was trying to save me? Why in the world would he want to do that? He's always hated my dad and Sirius."

"He wouldn't tell me," the Slytherin replied with a shrug. "Just told me to keep away from you, which, as you see, has worked out oh so marvellously."

"You should have listened to your father's advice, boy," Quirrell said. "Now you'll die here with Potter. You do see you're too nosy to live, Potter, don't you? Scurrying around the school at Hallowe'en like that; for all I knew you'd seen me coming to properly inspect the wards."

"So I was right," Snape said with a nod. "It was you who let the troll in."

"Certainly. I have a special gift with trolls – you must have seen what I did to the one in the chamber back there? Unfortunately, Dumbledore saw through it, sent McGonagall to check on the Stone before I could get to it." The female footsteps; so _that_ _'_ _s_ who it was he'd heard that night! "That's when Black started showing up, snooping around me, trying to find out my allegiance."

"Your allegiance?" Harry couldn't help but ask. "So you are stealing it for Voldemort. Got that part right, too, didn't I?"

"Don't say his name!" Quirrell yelled out, suddenly very angry. "You are not worthy of saying his name, Potter!"

"Where is he? I know he was in the Forest at the beginning of the month. How did you get McGonagall to send us into the Forest, then? That _was_ another attempt to kill me, wasn't it, just like this and the Quidditch match? Did you compel her?"

"Nothing so pedestrian," the man shot back with an arrogant smirk. "All that was needed was a touch of _Confundus_. Gullible woman, really."

"Because she trusted you," Harry growled, taking umbrage on behalf of his Head of House. "They _all_ trusted you, and you went and betrayed them!"

"You know nothing, you silly child! _I_ found the Dark Lord, me, when no one else did! I proved my worth is ten times greater than any of those snivelling idiots. Now shut up while I figure this last puzzle out. Trust Dumbledore to come up with something like this. But he's in London, and I'll be far away by the time he gets back."

That meant he didn't know the professors were right behind. They had surely also called Dumbledore back. At least one thing was to their advantage, if they could only keep him preoccupied. Before he could say something else, however, a sharp pain in his ribs made Harry turn to look at Snape, who was shaking his head lightly.

"What's the mirror?" Snape whispered, his breath hot on Harry's ear.

"Shows your greatest desires," Harry whispered back in the same way just as Quirrell's voice floated towards them.

"I see the Stone... I'm presenting it to my master... but where is it?"

By now, Harry was becoming frantic. He had to keep Quirrell's attention away from the Stone in one way or another, or they were doomed. He turned to Snape, whose green eyes looked as panicked as Harry felt, and his companion understood.

"Why were you crying, in your office, that one time I ran into you?" Snape asked suddenly, making Quirrell look at him.

"Is that why you stopped me on the stairwell?"

"Obviously; you sounded like you were being threatened. So much for being nice to people," he added with a mutter.

"Sometimes, I find it hard to follow my master's instructions... he is a great wizard and I am weak..."

"You mean, You-Know-Who was in the classroom with you? Here, at Hogwarts?" Snape asked, aghast. Harry's eyes flew wide as he turned to look at Quirrell. He knew Voldemort was somewhere around – after all, he'd been killing unicorns in the Forbidden Forest and even tried to off Harry only days ago. But that he'd gotten _into_ Hogwarts, that was another thing entirely.

"He is with me wherever I go." He went on to talk about power and his own failings at getting the Stone from Gringotts, that day Harry had met him and Hagrid, and he sounded utterly nutty, speaking about the monster having to be hard on him for his failures and whatnot, but Harry was focused on something else – even though Quirrell's greatest desire was to get the Stone, the Mirror wasn't showing him where it was. So long as that was kept secret, they were still golden – and it had to mean Dumbledore had made some sort of modification to the Mirror as the ultimate protection. If they could work with that for long enough that the professors had time to barge in, then they'd be saved.

"He tortures you," Snape cut through the crazy man's sentence, sounding disgusted. "The monster tortures you, and you still serve him? You're insane."

"You dare... speak of me so... boy?" an ethereal voice broke through, sounding as if it was coming from Quirrell himself, and what little colour was left in Snape's face was completely gone now. He was white as a sheet, and breathing very shallowly.

"What the hell?" Harry snapped, realizing already that the thing speaking couldn't be anything other than Voldemort, and he had his attention on Snape. There were many things Harry was willing to risk when he decided to act in a certain way, but risking other people was a line he refused to cross, a line that he knew only too well. His parents had died for him, and he was not about to let anyone else, not even a greasy Slytherin, die for him. "He's inside of you? Oh, that's just disgusting!"

"Potter!" Snape hissed beside him, but Harry ignored him.

"That means he _pees_ through you and, like, does other stuff with your body, too?! You are completely perverted!"

"Bring him... to me..." the voice said, and Harry breathed out a quiet sigh of relief. Good; so long as he was focused on Harry, Snape had a chance to get out of this. He ignored another jab to his ribs from the boy beside him as Quirrell waved his wand, and the ropes around him fell to the floor.

"Come here, Potter. Look at the Mirror and tell me what you see."

There was no question as to what he should do. Wrinkling his nose at that damn awful smell that always followed Quirrell around, Harry stepped in front of the Mirror, took a deep breath, and looked at it, already expecting to see his mum staring back.

What he saw, however, was his own reflection, pale and shaking lightly, but with defiance in his blue eyes. Then, before his very eyes, the reflection of Harry Potter in the Mirror relaxed and smiled at him. It put its hands into its pocket and pulled out a blood-red stone, before winking and putting it back again. As it did so, however, Harry felt the weight against his thigh, and with an equal jolt of excitement and dread, he realised he had the actual Stone in his pocket.

Shit.

Remus had been right all along, but Dumbledore had been, too; the Mirror did show both knowledge and truth, but it was not the way people wanted it to be shown, the way Quirrell was obviously expecting it to work, just like Dumbledore had told him – it showed the truth of one's greatest desire, but it wasn't a lifetime desire, it was a momentary desire, and the one thing he wanted most right this moment was to protect the Stone; there was no long-lasting truth to it, nothing life-moving. Just _a_ truth, little and insignificant as the fickleness of desire, and now spectacularly backfiring on him, because by now Harry wasn't fooling himself anymore that he'd be able to fight off both Quirrell and Voldemort, and with the Stone in his pocket, the game wasn't keeping Quirrell's attention from the Mirror anymore, it was keeping it _on_ it.

"Well? What do you see?"

Now was the moment, he thought desperately, calling on all of his Gryffindor courage. He looked at Snape, all wrapped up in ropes, staring at him in desperation and shaking his head. When their eyes met, a voice floated through his mind, a desperate, screaming voice that was no more than a whisper. Don't lie to him, he'll know! It sounded suspiciously like Evan Snape's voice.

Harry had no idea how this could possibly be true, or how Snape could know it, but in that moment, he trusted that tinny, distant voice in his head. But the weight of the Stone in his pocket reminded him that he _had_ to lie, or else they'd all be dead, and he couldn't – wouldn't – let that happen. So what was he supposed to do? Tell a truth! the Slytherin's voice called out desperately in his mind. But the truth was unacceptable, completely unacceptable.

"Tell me what you see!" Quirrell ordered, sounding very impatient and on edge. Harry blinked, and that connection he felt with Snape was gone with one last parting image of his smiling parents. With a sudden jolt of excitement, he knew exactly what had to say – the Mirror had given him exactly the knowledge he needed to win here.

"I... I see my mum," he whispered, summoning the image he'd seen half a year ago, in this same mirror. "She's hugging me, and promising never to leave me."

It wasn't hard to fake the melancholy pain in his voice, or the yearning for what that image showed. All he had to do was close his eyes to see it again, and all his feelings came back with it like a tide.

Quirrell cursed and pushed him out of the way to stare at the Mirror again, and Harry didn't waste any time in freeing Snape. He had no chance of overpowering a Voldemort-possessed Defence Professor alone, but with Snape, they still stood a chance – Snape was dead accurate with his curses and hexes, and the man was so obsessed with the Mirror, they might be able to catch him by surprise again. If only they could get their wands back.

"Let me speak to him... face to face..."

The voice was actually very creepy, but it didn't seem to notice what he was doing, as Quirrell was turned away from them.

"There's a pocket knife in my robes," Snape hissed at him as Harry tried, without any success, to loosen the ropes. Glancing back, he checked that Quirrell was still with his back to them, before attempting to pull Snape's robes down enough to tug the pocket the Slytherin had indicated free of the ropes, noting mentally to ask the Slytherin later why in the world he'd even have such a thing, let alone with him now.

"Master, you are not strong enough!"

Snape wiggled, trying to help as much as he could, as Harry continued to tug on the ropes with one hand and pull on the cloth with the other. He could feel the edge of the pocket seam under his fingers now.

"I have strength enough... for this..."

A glance back told him Quirrell was unwrapping his turban, but a hiss from the other boy brought his attention back, and he pushed his right hand past the ropes and into the pocketas hard as he could, finally feeling the cold metal under his fingers. Another tug, and the pocket knife was free; Harry opened it and put it in Snape's open hand just as the purple turban fell to the floor.

For a moment, Harry felt a startled scream rising in his throat, and he swallowed it with difficulty. Where the back of Quirrell's head was supposed to be was another face, with glaring red eyes, non-existent lips and slits for nostrils, reminding him of a snake ready to strike its prey. Is this Voldemort?

"Harry Potter..." the face whispered, pinning him down with a look, and he slammed his eyes shut the moment that strange tingling sensation he'd felt moments before with Snape started creeping through his mind again. The sensation vanished, only to reappear full force as his scar burst in pain, and Harry screamed, falling to the ground, still keeping his eyes tightly shut. "See what I have become? Mere shadow and vapour... I have form only when I share another's body... but there have always been those willing to let me into their hearts and minds... Unicorn blood has strengthened me these past weeks... and you saw faithful Quirrell drinking it for me in the Forest... and once I have the Elixir of Life, I will be able to create a body of my own... now... show me where it is!"

Clutching to his burning forehead, Harry stumbled away from the creature, trying to think of his mum, trying to remember her as he saw her in the Mirror, so that when he died, he'd at least die looking at the woman he loved most in his life.

"Ah, yes, your parents, the fools... they died begging for mercy..."

" _Liar!_ " Harry snarled (well, screamed; he didn't have the vocal capacity to snarl yet, though the sentiment was there), fury rising up in him as Sirius' words filtered through his mind, his assurance that his parents were heroes, that they always stood up bravely against Voldemort, that they gave their lives for him willingly.

"How touching... I always value bravery... but there was nothing brave in their deaths, _nothing..._ your father didn't even have a wand with him... and your mother needn't have died at all... she had a choice, child, a choice I'd given her... all she had to do was step aside, but she defied me... all just to protect you... it's your fault she's dead..."

" _No!_ " he screamed again as a hand descended on his hair to pull his head up sharply. Still he kept his eyes closed, kept thinking of his parents, the images of them in his scrapbook, his mum's face in the Mirror, not thinking of the St–

The hand let go of his hair, and he fell to the ground with a painful yelp as a loud crash rang out through the chamber. Peeking through his lashes, he saw two figures rolling round on the floor, a gangly black-haired boy and a much larger adult, in the remains of what had once been the Mirror of Erised. Then the adult howled, and Snape jumped back, his wand pointed at Quirrell, Harry's in his other hand. For a single moment, there was nothing, no movement, no sound, nothing.

" _Kill him! Kill them both!_ " Voldemort screamed, and Quirrell lunged, much faster than Harry ever thought possible, too fast for Snape to react in any way but to step back, onto the glass shards, in his socked feet. He let out a scream of pain as Quirrell fell over him, hands around his throat, and the fury in Harry rose again, giving him strength through that pain in his head that had lessened to quite manageable now that Voldemort was keeping his attention on the other boy.

Harry's wand had clattered all the way to the other side of the chamber when Evan had sliced his feet on the glass and fallen. He didn't think he'd have time to get it and even if he did, there was a big possibility he'd hit the Slytherin, Quirrell was just too close to him. So, with nothing else at his disposal but brute force, he lunged at Quirrell himself before Voldemort could warn him of a sneak attack, wrapping his arms around the man's neck from behind and his legs around his torso piggyback and trying to gouge his eyes out, all the while fighting to be as far away from the other face as possible. It was a somewhat awkward task.

The moment their skin touched, his forehead was splitting in pain again, but Quirrell was howling and screaming like a dying animal, fighting to throw him off. The man's cheeks under his fingers were warm and getting warmer, and when Quirrell's arms wrapped back around him to try and throw him off, his fingers on Harry's skin also felt warm and rough, unnaturally so. With some part of his mind, through the debilitating pain, Harry realised it was he who was doing it – he was somehow burning Quirrell with his touch. That made him redouble his efforts as he clutched to him like a man drowning, and Quirrell screamed and screamed. By now he couldn't see anything at all from the pain, but he hung on, his muscles locked in spasm, as Quirrell fell to the ground and sharp glass cut through Harry's pinned arm, embedding itself into his skin.

" _Kill him! Kill him, you weakling!_ "

"Potter!"

"Harry!"

"Potter!"

Then he was gone, and he saw no more.

* * *

 **A/N:** Hope you enjoyed the Stone chase remix as much as I did writing it. It was actually one of the earliest scenes that came to me when I was planning this out, and though it's evolved with the flow of the story, I've always been planning to have Harry and Evan be pushed to work together. It's perhaps the first time, but it won't be the last, that much I can say for sure. Also, this is officially the longest chapter I've ever posted, clocking in at 16.000+ words. Didn't really plan it out that way, but I didn't want to remove things, either.

So, some background - Regulus' intervention forced Quirrell to go after the Stone sooner than in canon (before the exams, rather than after). The harp playing is from the movie, rather than the book, but the harp _was_ mentioned in the book too, so since I was tweaking the timeline anyway, I figured it'd be ok. Explanation enough - the spell hadn't yet worn off the harp here the way it had in the book. 'Defer' slips pop up once again, they were a birthday present from Evan to Hermione at the beginning of the story. Quirrell did try to kill Harry in canon, so I felt it perfectly acceptable that he'd extend this even further and make sure Harry would both go after him without the adults suspecting (the wards being tampered with, rather than fully brought down) and not be able to run away (the fused doors). Evan's pocket knife is a gift from Severus in Ch 3, given on the train platform.

Also, one more note, given some of the comments I've received about the last chapter: for those who feel that the Order is not playing by the democratic rules, what with being a secret society trying to secretly run the government - yes, that's very purposeful, and will be coming into play eventually. The Order was initially functioning as opposition to LV, and was disbanded after the first war in canon; here, because Order members who'd died in canon were the ones galvanized to change wizarding politics, they chose to keep the Order running, adapting it instead to their needs. _This is not meant to be presented as a good thing,_ and that scene was supposed to raise warning bells in readers' minds. Having secret groups playing god with the sociopolitical situation of any country is wrong, but it can happen, and good things can come of it; whether the bad outweighs the good is the more important question. In this case, it's important to keep in mind that the Order's mission isn't to focus on the bloodism problem (the Order has all three groups as members), it's to modernize Wizarding Britain, at the cost of tradition if necessary. They're having a good run currently, but that doesn't mean their mistakes and flaws won't be exposed eventually; think of the issues MoM has to deal with in later books (starting with the hunt on Muggle-borns in CoS, then on to escaped Azkaban prisoner in PoA, and of course LV's return), and just remember that every positive action has negative consequences (otherwise people wouldn't be split along any sort of political or economic lines; nothing is ever 100% good, or good enough for everyone, for that matter).


	23. Ch 22: The Promises of Things to Come

**A/N:** Several people have noted that it's hard to distinguish who 'Snape' is that's being referred to in text in any given instance, specifically with respect to the conversation between Harry, Evan and Quirrell in the last chapter. I'll try to make that more streamlined on edits at some point, but the rule is - consider who the person is who is speaking; usually, 'Snape' is the name they use for the one that they would consider their peer (so, Harry thinks of Evan as 'Snape', but of his father as either 'Mr Snape' or 'Snape Senior'; by contrast, Quirrell will think of Severus as 'Snape', because they're contemporaries, while 'Mr Snape' is Evan, because they always use this type of address when interacting with their students). In hindsight, I see how confusing this is. I apologize.

* * *

 **Chapter 22: The Promises of Things to Come**

Coming back to himself was about as unpleasant as leaving, Harry thought groggily when he could actually think again. His mind was full of cotton, the pain a dull sort of after-image to what it was, stopping him from falling asleep again.

There were voices coming from his left, and he fought to open his eyes, see who it was. All he could see was a bed and a tall black blur standing beside it.

"If I didn't know you better, I might have thought you'd taken leave of your senses, Evan," a low, dangerous voice was saying. It sounded very mad. "What were you thinking?!"

"I was trying to stop them, and they dragged me into it."

"That does not explain why you went all the way through. You could have stopped at my protection! You had a clear way back, I know you knew about the second potion! Do you know how much you scared your mother?! I am very disappointed, young man!"

"I know, Father." The voice sounded dejected. "I'm sorry."

No, this was wrong, Harry thought through the fog, fighting to rouse himself. That was all wrong.

He heard a long sigh and the ruffling of robes, and with his half-lidded eyes, Harry saw the man sit down onto the bed.

"You got caught in the excitement, didn't you? You liked the puzzles, and you didn't think about the danger."

"I guess," Snape said softly again, his voice displaying utter defeat. "Hermione was right, we couldn't just let them go kill themselves, and then they dragged me with, and then... I don't know. It seemed important not to let _him_ get the Stone. I didn't want things to go back to how they were during the War. What would have happened to you and Mum? He'd try to kill her, and you'd have to hide again, and I don't want to lose our shop and our house and–"

"That would not happen," Snape's father said firmly, interrupting what sounded to Harry's groggy mind like the beginning of a crying spell. "If and when the Dark Lord returns, things will change, but you will _never_ lose me or your mother, Evan. It is not your job to be fixing the world's problems; you are eleven years old, Son. You are the child, and we are the adults. And that includes stopping that idiot Potter's spawn from getting himself killed, especially because of what he's put you through this year."

"What he..."

"The bullying, which you neglected to mention in any of your letters or any of our sessions. Which you apparently went to great lengths to conceal, as a matter of fact, and do not think it's slipped my notice that I saw no evidence of it during out Occlumency sessions."

"It's my problem, Dad! If I'd told you, you'd have just fought with Potter's guardian and then I would have been the weak one for tattling on them to my father! I can handle it! I'm not weak!"

"No, Son, you're not, but nor should you have to handle it yourself – and your mother will certainly have words with you about the particular _methods_ of handling it you've used."

"Oh."

"Yes, 'oh'."

 _Oh_ , Harry thought, too. They were talking about Seamus being in the hospital.

"But you won't? Have words with me about it?"

"Don't push your luck, Evan."

 _That wasn_ _'_ _t a_ _'_ _yes_ _'_. Harry wasn't surprised in the least; then again, he somehow thought he was about to be in the same situation himself, about that whole thing.

His aching back finally made Harry give up on eavesdropping and instead try to shift into a more comfortable position, a groan escaping him in the process that attracted the attention of the other two. The father and son on the other bed straightened as they turned to look at him, but they were too blurry for him to distinguish their expressions, or much of anything else, when it came down to it.

"Potter–"

"Dad, don't, please."

Blinking, Harry suddenly realised that the bigger of the two shapes had gotten up off the bed, and frowned. Where _were_ his glasses anyway?

"How are you feeling, Potter?"

"Fine – What happened? Did he get the Stone? Did we stop him?" he shot out the questions rapid-fire, knowing his priorities full well.

"No, you saved it. Whatever you were doing, it hurt Quirrell pretty badly, and it was right when the professors, and Dumbledore with them, managed to get through. Then, when you passed out, this black mist rose out of his facial cavities and flew away before anyone could do anything about it."

"He escaped," Harry concluded, sighing and shifting a bit to stretch out his aching muscles.

"But you're alive, even though he tried to kill you; you beat him again."

"Yeah," Harry agreed, the thought sending pleasant tingles through him; really, that was the third time this year that he'd survived an attempt by Voldemort himself, and if that didn't make him awesome and that monster pathetic, he didn't know what did. "And the Stone?"

"Dumbledore's got it."

"That Stone was very well protected, and the Dark Lord wouldn't have gotten his hands on it, had you two little cretins not been there," Snape's father says, voice low, smooth and deadly. "As it stands, you scraped through on sheer luck alone."

"And yet," another voice cut from the other side of the room, one Harry identified as Dumbledore's. "And yet, they faced one of the darkest wizards of our times and they are both still here. Harry, my boy, how do you feel?"

"Sore," he admitted. "Head hurts."

"Yes, Voldemort is known for his brutal use of Legilimency," Dumbledore confirmed, running his hand gently, soothingly through Harry's messy hair, making Harry close his eyes lightly and lean his head further into the touch without conscious thought.

"Hm?"

"He couldn't see where the Stone was," Snape once again translated. "He used a type of magic called Legilimency to dig through your mind, trying to find out where it was. How did you know to close your eyes?"

"Felt same as when you did it," Harry explained, wiggling up just enough to touch his bedside table blindly in search for his glasses, but not enough to make Dumbledore step away. There were quite a lot of things on his bedside table, actually, but glasses weren't one of them. Then a hand appeared in his field of vision, holding them, and Harry gratefully accepted.

"Tokens from your friends and admirers," Dumbledore explained. "What happened down in the dungeons between you two and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally, the whole school knows. I believe your friends Misters Fred and George Weasley were responsible for trying to send you a lavatory seat, to both of you, actually. No doubt they thought it would amuse you. Madam Pomfrey, however, felt it might not be very hygienic, and confiscated them."

"What did you mean, Potter," Snape Senior asked, "same as Evan did it?"

Harry turned his head a bit to take Evan's father in fully. He looked as forbidding as always, and somewhere between very angry and trying to keep control of himself, it Harry had any experience with facial expressions of displeased adults.

"He... he knew that Voldemort would know if I lied," Harry tried to explain. "But I had to lie, I couldn't let him get the Stone! So, I looked at him – Snape, I mean – and he reminded me about Mum, that I see her in the Mirror. And I did, I didn't think of anything else but my mum in the Mirror."

"You legilimised Potter? Without a wand?" the elder Snape asked sharply, turning back to his son, who, for his part, didn't look down, but just nodded in confirmation.

"Yeah; I didn't know what else to do – he was going to blurt out something stupid, and I know the stories about You-Know-Who's Legilimency. I had to help him somehow! You-Know-Who... the, the _thing_..." At that, the younger Snape fell silent, and fear and revulsion was written all over his face.

"He was in Quirrell's head, on the back," Harry explained, remembering that horrible sight. "It was like something out of a horror film."

"Like Janus," Evan filled in quietly. At Harry's blank look, he clarified. "The Roman god with two faces."

"Oh."

"And I'd been trying to figure out how to use what you taught me to touch surface thought, but even if I didn't, I knew I'd be able to find something useful in his head if only I could do it, and I did; it worked. You saw what I'd dug up, right?"

"Of course, the image of my parents. I didn't know there was such a thing as telepathy," Harry said, frowning at him. "I mean, you were very quiet, but I heard you, both times."

"Wait, you did?" Evan said, eyes flying wide. "As in, _actually_ heard my voice?"

"Yeah; you told me lying wouldn't work, and to tell a truth. It was definitely your voice."

"Oh... wow, it worked," the other boy whispered, mouth falling open.

"What did, Evan?" Snape asked, and Evan turned stunned eyes towards him.

"Surface thought touching, I didn't... I'd been trying to figure out how to do it for months, ever since winter hols, but you never heard me during our sessions, I didn't–"

"What would have given you such a preposterous idea in the first place?!"

"But it's a _good_ idea!" Evan exclaimed. "Think about it! I figured out how to direct and amplify conscious thoughts years ago, so that a Legilimens like you could pick them up, but if I can figure this out and actually _send_ thoughts, then it's as good as telepathy, because so long as _I_ can do it, I can speak to anyone like that! And it worked, I can't believe it worked!"

"Wait, wait, wait," Harry interrupted him. "Are you saying that you _invented_ something new?"

"I... guess I did."

Oh, wow. Even Harry couldn't stop himself from being momentarily impressed.

"You are not to experiment on that without supervision, is that clear?" Snape Senior said, glaring his son down and practically making him wilt before their eyes. "You know better, Evan."

"Yeah, ok," he agreed quietly, looking almost dejected, though the moment his father turned to exchange looks with Dumbledore, Evan perked right back up with a pleased little smile, and Harry realised that he was being slytherin with his father.

It was hilarious (and just a smidge awesome).

"So, what happened after he tried to dig through my head?"

Evan turned his head towards Harry and shrugged. "It took me a while, but I managed to cut the ropes and free myself, so when he tried to pull you up, I lunged for him, knocked him into the Mirror. I... I tried to stab him, you know, with my knife, but I... he pulled away, so I only nicked him."

"And where was your wand in all of this?" Snape focused back on him.

"Quirrell took them when he bound us, and by the time I managed to get them from him, he was already charging me. I couldn't react in time."

"That still does not explain why you had no shoes on when you were found. Your feet were tattered to shreds."

"Erm..."

"That's my fault, sir," Harry said sheepishly, noticing Evan's hesitation. "When Snape and Hermione tried to stop us, I hit him with _Colloshoo_. When we heard the professors coming, Ron and I grabbed him and pulled him with us, but his shoes remained stuck to the ground."

"Potter, I–"

The doors to the infirmary opened with a bang, and in ran seven people. Harry's brain registered first Hermione, who flew past his bed to hug Evan. The Slytherin boy looked completely flustered, face red as a tomato, and Harry couldn't help but snicker at the sight.

"I was so worried! Why did you let them drag you with them?!"

"I didn't have much of a choice," Evan gasped. "You're strangling me, Hermione!"

"Oh," she replied sheepishly, stepping back a bit, towards the two other Slytherins, Nott and Davis. "Sorry."

"You're mental, you know that, right?" Davis asked him, giving him a pat on the back, while Nott shook his head.

"Next time, you better get her, too," he advised Evan. "You know how she likes hexing Gryffindors; this way, _I_ had to suffer her nagging all last night and this morning."

"How are you, mate?" Ron's voice from the other side of his bed made him turn around and smile at his best friend. Seamus and Dean were behind him, giving Harry their biggest smiles.

"Been better, but I'll survive. You?"

"Nah, I'm just peachy. Madam Pomfrey fixed me right up. I had to sleep here, but she let me go by breakfast."

"Neville? Is he all right?"

Neville had tried to stop them from going last night, citing Harry's own words that he should be able to stand up to people, and Dean had used _Petrificus Totalus_ to keep him out of their way.

"Upset that we Petrified him, but otherwise quite all right; we freed him the first chance we got," Dean promised. "He'll come 'round, and we did tell him we were proud of him for standing up to us."

"Right," Seamus said with a snort, and Harry grinned.

Only then did he notice the last person, who was standing a bit away and smiling warmly at him. A grin split his face at the sight.

"Sirius!"

His godfather was by the bed in three steps, pulling him into a tight hug that allowed Harry to sag against him in relief. Now that Sirius was here, he knew everything would be fine. After a long minute, he pulled away and leaned back against the headboard, giving Hermione, who was looking at him rather worriedly, a comforting smile.

"Snivellus."

"Black."

And the situation pretty much went to hell from there.

"Your ward was the reason my son nearly died yesterday!"

"Your son attacked Harry for no reason whatsoever! No one asked him to meddle!"

"He _dragged_ Evan into his own mess when he got caught!"

"And your son nearly let that plant kill them both down there!"

"Don't be delusional, Black, my son was smart enough to know there would not have been any life-threatening danger from that plant, unlike _your ward. He_ is just like his worthless father, strutting around, believing himself invincible and endangering everyone, _including my son_ , in the process, without the idea of self-preservation in his head! And as for the bullying–"

"Well, _your child_ is no better than you ever were, Snivellus, sticking your big nose into our business all the time, slithering around and spying on us like the Snake you are! For the life of me, I can't figure out what Lily ever saw in you–"

"At least I can't go around boasting about nearly killing another student for my petty grudges! And the last time I checked, you couldn't sustain a meaningful relationship with anyone but that wolf of yours, so colour me surprised that you don't know the first thing about my relationship with my wife!"

"Never lay off that, do you?! It was your stupidity, you greasy git, that got you into that place, don't go blaming me for your own shortcomings! If you hadn't..."

Harry's mind was still a bit too muddy to fully understand the situation, especially when the words were flying like a precise Ping-Pong ball, but from what he did catch, this was dissolving into an outright shouting match between the two grownups. He glanced back to the Slytherin in the other bed, only to grin when he saw Evan holding his head in his hands, greasy hair tangled in his fingers. Beside the two beds, Ron, Dean, Seamus, Hermione, Nott and Davis were observing the confrontation with more and more alarm.

"Gentlemen!" Dumbledore finally bellowed, stopping the two, who were by now face to face and both very angry.

"This is a hospital!" Madam Pomfrey shrieked at them, having appeared out of nowhere. "If you two intend to behave like bickering children, you can do so _outside of these walls_! This is a place for healing, and your two sons do not need to listen to you fight over childhood issues! What sort of examples you're setting for them, no wonder they're like Kneazles and Crups! Now out! Both of you! And don't dare come back together unless you've sorted it out! _Now!_ "

Trying not to snicker was rather hard as the stern matron shooed Sirius and Snape's father out like they were children, locking the door behind them for good measure.

"What was that?" Hermione asked, staring wide-eyed after them.

"I was hoping that wouldn't happen," Snape muttered into his hands.

"It was funny, though, right?" Harry commented, still grinning.

"It was _embarrassing_ , is what it was," Snape corrected him.

"I knew you agreed with me." Snape rolled his eyes in response, and Harry caught himself in the act of returning a smirk. "So, what happened to the Stone, Grampa?" he asked hurriedly, suddenly itching to change the topic of conversation, awkward about actually _having_ a civil conversation with Evan Snape.

"It has been destroyed, Harry."

"Destroyed?" Snape asked, frowning. "But, that means Nicolas Flemel..."

"Oh, you know about Nicolas?" Dumbledore asked, sounding quite delighted.

"Of course, sir," Hermione confirmed with a nod. "It was how we realised the thing on the third floor was the Philosopher's Stone in the first place. Harry came to me about it, and Evan was the one who figured it all out."

Dumbledore smiled happily. "Cooperation is the key to success, and I see you children have that well in hand. Well, Nicolas and I have had a little chat and agreed it's all for the best."

"But that means he and his wife will die, won't they?" Harry asked, frowning.

"They have enough Elixir stored to set their affairs in order and then, yes, they will die. To ones as young as you, I'm sure it seems incredible, but to Nicolas and Perenelle, it really is like going to bed after a very, very long day. After all, to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know, the Stone was really not such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all – the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them."

"He'll be back," Snape said softly, eyes hidden by his curtain of hair so that Harry couldn't see what he really felt about it. Fear? Or merely apprehension? "You-Know-Who."

"Call him Voldemort, Evan," the Headmaster corrected gently. "All of you, you should call him Voldemort. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases the fear of the thing itself."

"Then I understand why people are afraid to say his name."

"Well, I'm not afraid of him," Harry said with ease. It wasn't even that far from the truth. He was apprehensive about the monster, but having come out of their second direct encounter not too much worse for wear (to say nothing for having quite easily survived the other two attempts on his life this year), he didn't feel fear, especially not from a not-quite-living spectre that could only stick out of someone's head.

"Then you're an idiot, Potter," Snape snapped back at him. "He'll try other ways of coming back, right?"

"Yes, he is still out there, not truly alive, nor dead either. He cannot be killed in this form. He left Quirrell to die; he shows just as little mercy to his followers as his enemies."

"Yeah, we got that from what Quirrell said," Harry confirmed, remembering the man's words with disgust. "And he even though he deserved that kind of punishment!"

"Weak people will always search for a powerful being to guide them. All you can hope is that the person they worship understands the danger and weight of that power." By the pointed look he sent Harry's way, it was very clear to the boy that the wizened old wizard was speaking of Harry's fame, and the responsibility that came with it, a responsibility Harry himself preferred not to think about just now. "There are many who have made the mistake of believing Lord Voldemort to be worthy of their allegiance, only to later on realise their mistake. Unfortunately, they learned too late that, once you fall into his clutches, you can never truly come out of them again, not so long as he exists."

That made Harry think of Regulus and his Dark Mark.

"Grandpa," and he really needed to switch back to more formal address like Sirius and Remus had insisted before the beginning of the school year, but he was too tired for it just now, and besides, Snape already knew, so there was little point to hiding it, was there, "can you tell me the truth about some things?"

"The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution."

"Yeah, I've figured that out," he promised, thinking back on the Mirror.

"Well, then, I shall answer your questions unless I have a very good reason not to, in which case I beg you'll forgive me. I shall not, of course, lie."

Harry glanced around, at his best friends, a girl he thought of as a nice acquaintance, the two Slytherins he did not trust one bit, and the boy that had so far been his foil at best, and an enemy at worst. Was he comfortable with them knowing these things? But he felt he wouldn't get a second chance to ask them, so he barged on ahead.

"Why couldn't Quirrell touch me?"

"Your mother died to save you, Harry. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn't realise that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign... to have been loved so deeply that they gave their life for you when they had a clear choice, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever."

"Sacrificial magic," Snape breathed in the bed beside him.

"I've read about that," Hermione jumped in. "Life given in the form of unimaginably powerful magic."

"Yes, Evan, Miss Granger, you are correct. With her sacrifice, she has imbued your blood, Harry, indeed your very skin with a power that will always physically protect you from Voldemort. To him, it is agony to touch the magic that you carry with you."

"But why would Voldemort want to kill me? I mean, he tried _three times_ this year–"

"That you know of," Snape broke in. "He hinted he'd tried more than that but was thwarted by Regulus, remember?"

"That's what he meant? Well, anyway, he tried a bunch of times, and he even killed my parents just to get to me when I was only six months old!"

This time, Dumbledore's sigh was very deep.

"Alas, that is one of the things I cannot tell you. Not today. Not now. You will know, one day. Put it from your mind for now, Harry. When you are older – I know you hate to hear this – when you are ready, you will know."

"And when will that be?" Harry pressed.

"When it becomes necessary. This is a burden that should not be placed on children such as yourselves."

"I'm not a helpless kid," Harry grumbled, receiving a congenial smile from the old wizard.

"Of course not, but you are nonetheless still a child. There will be time enough for life-altering revelations."

"Yeah, but when?" He really did want this as clear as possible, otherwise the curiosity would eat him up, and he was pretty sure the Headmaster would be angry if he started digging on his own.

"Do you want me to give you a precise date?" Dumbledore sounded amused.

"If you can, that'd be great, yeah."

"Very well," was the answer, though Harry got the impression that he was being indulged. "When you complete your education, unless by some chance, Voldemort returns to full power."

"So, when I become an adult, or when he becomes an actual threat. I can live with that. And, also, there's one more thing."

"Just the one?"

"How did I get the Stone out of the Mirror?"

"Ah, now, I'm glad you asked me that. It was one of my more brilliant ideas, and between you and me, that's saying something. You see, only one who wanted to _find_ the Stone – find it, but not use it – would be able to get it, otherwise they'd just see themselves making gold or drinking the Elixir of Life. My brain surprises even me sometimes."

"But, that means Quirrell never could have gotten the Stone in the first place!" Snape exclaimed, sitting upright.

"That is correct, Evan."

"See, Potter? I _told you_ to trust Grandp– I mean, Professor Dumbledore, when he said the Stone was safe! And you still went rushing in, and then You-Know-Who–"

"Voldemort," Harry corrected him.

"–got himself a way to the Stone!" Snape finished over his words. "And we both could have been killed because of it!"

"But we weren't," Harry protested. "You saved me, and I saved you, and Voldemort is gone for now."

"Yes, but Professor Quirrell is dead," Hermione pointed out quietly, bringing his mood down instantly.

"Yeah."

If there was one thing Harry hated above all else, it was people dying for him. Or because of him, as the case may be. It was something he still hadn't quite digested, and he knew that there was only one person he'd ever speak with on the subject once he did. So, in true Potter fashion, he pushed the ugly truth out of his mind for now, until he was in his home, surrounded by his things, sitting across from his godfather, who'd listen to his thoughts and give his opinion in return, and make sure that Harry understood it the way he was supposed to.

"Well, then, children, I will leave you to it. I suggest you make a start on these sweets. Ah! Bertie Bott's Every-Flavour-Beans! I was unfortunate enough in my youth to come across a vomit-flavoured one, and since then I'm afraid I've rather lost my liking for them – but I think I'll be safe with a nice toffee, don't you?" He smiled, then, and popped the golden-brown bean into his mouth. A moment later, he choked and said: "Alas! Earwax!"

The children laughed, and, with a twinkle in his eye, Dumbledore left.

* * *

"I always said he was off his rocker," Weasley commented once the Headmaster was gone. In response, Evan rolled his eyes.

"He has more brains then all of the students in this place combined," he replied, looking at the redhead.

"What _is_ it with you two and calling him your grandfather all of a sudden?" Theo asked, squinting at both of them with narrowed eyes. "You've never done that before, Evan."

Evan and Potter exchanged dubious looks for a moment, before Evan sighed.

"He and my dad are close, so when I was a kid, he'd always come around for dinner and such, and both of my real grandfathers died before I was born, so he's the only one I had. I just... didn't think it appropriate to call him that when I'm here and he's the Headmaster; it'd stink of personal bias, and I'd never live that down in Slytherin, you guys know that."

To this, both Tracey and Theo had to commiseratingly nod their heads.

"He visited with me and Sirius a lot too when I was little," Potter volunteered. "I mean, I guess it's probably cause he knew I'd have to fight Voldemort eventually, but he still played with me and even babysat me a few times when Sirius had a dangerous case. What else _do_ you call an old person who is like a relative to you?"

"So why not just call him Mister Albus or Uncle Albus or something like that?" Hermione asked, making both Evan and Potter stare at her in flat disbelief.

" _Really_?" Potter voiced. "He's _Dumbledore_ , and you want to call him _Uncle Albus_?"

"Well, it's a perfectly sensible suggestion no matter who he is!" she harrumphed.

"Only because you didn't grow up in the Wizarding world," Evan told her gently, patting her elbow in comfort. "Dumbledore is... an institution, in Wizarding Britain. It'd just feel wrong."

She huffed, but apparently let the topic rest.

"D'you think he meant you to do it, Harry?" Thomas asked, steering the conversation in a different direction. "Going after the Stone? After all, _he_ never told you not to, just McGonagall."

"Well, if he did, then he cares more for schemes than Harry's life! And that thought's just awful!" Hermione cried out, enraged.

"I don't know," Potter replied thoughtfully. "He's a funny man, you know. It feels like he knows everything that goes on in this place. I reckon he knew I'd do this, and he gave me tools to do it instead of stopping me – I bet he was the one keeping Dad's Invisibility Cloak safe, and he also taught me about the Mirror so I'd know what to do with it – which must mean he trusts me enough for it. It's almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort if I could."

"You are a target, Potter," Evan cut in. "And you'll be a target until You-Know-Who–"

"Voldemort."

"–is gone. He may have been preparing you for greater dangers ahead."

"Yeah," Potter agreed with a snort. "Though I doubt he planned on you being there with me."

"Maybe," Evan hedged, wondering that himself. Some of the traps, especially his father's, were too complex to have been easily solved by any of the Marauders. Yet he or Hermione were perfect for the job. He knew that if his father suspected something like this from Dumbledore, the old man would be in for a nasty surprise.

* * *

" _What_ did you let happen, Albus?!" Severus exploded as soon as the doors to the Headmaster's office closed. "You allowed three eleven-year-olds access to a three-headed dog, a Devil's Snare, a destructive wizarding chess where they had to be chessmen, a troll, and a puzzle that could have ended with them poisoned, all so that they could go chase after something _you knew_ was unreachable, and in the process exposed them to the most evil dark wizard of the last sixty years?! And you said 'good job'?! Are you going mad, old man?!"

"Severus, do control yourself," Dumbledore chided, taking a seat in his chair.

"No, Albus," Sirius cut in, looking as mad as Severus felt. "As much as it pains me to admit it, I agree with Snape. They could have been killed!"

"No more than you could have during your outings with Remus," Dumbledore reminded him calmly, and, to Severus' outrage, Black actually looked properly chastised by it.

"Now, I understand that you are angry that this has happened–"

"No, I'm angry that you knew it would happen, and you let it!" Severus yelled back, smacking his hands on Albus' desk with a bang. "They are _eleven_ , Albus! My son was almost killed by that monster because you wanted to test the Potter boy?"

"Ah, but there is a great deal more at stake here than simply testing the children," the old wizard replied, completely unmoved by their rant. "They have, in one fell swoop, positively confirmed that Lord Voldemort is indeed still alive, they have proven to him that they will not be cowered – he will be much more cautious the next time he makes an attempt such as this – and I do believe the relationship between your two sons has thawed somewhat with this shared adventure."

" _Adventure_?!" Severus bellowed, completely enraged. "You call this an _adventure_?!"

"There will be a war, Severus, you and I are both aware of this," Dumbledore said calmly. "And when it does happen, Harry Potter will be the central figure. He needs to know whom he can trust, needs to know who his true friends are. I rather hope your son will be one of these people."

"No, Albus. No! Potter has done nothing but terrorise him and bully him every chance he got!"

"Please, Snivellus, like your brat didn't give as good as he got," Black cut in with a snort.

"I will not let that child you claim to have raised be a thorn in my son's side for his whole Hogwarts education, Black, and if I have to, so help me–"

"Enough," Dumbledore said, cutting in. "Harry and Evan did start off on the wrong foot, but have proven that, when it matters, they can cooperate and work together. Indeed, they saved each other's lives, and more than once. Those two boys are not you, and I will not let you project your personal qualms onto their relationship, if I have to involve myself with it personally; their relationship has been tainted enough as is. No, we must all work to improve it, if for nothing else, then so that their experiences here at Hogwarts don't mirror your own. You owe your children to not turn them into yourselves."

Feeling about as chastised as Black looked, Severus dropped back into his chair. As he did so, the fire in the hearth flared green, and Regulus Black stepped out, dusting off his overcoat in a smooth, practiced, aristocratic move.

"Ah, Regulus," Dumbledore greeted him as the younger Black brother gave a tight nod to the Headmaster, before greeting his brother and his best friend.

"Is it true, then, Albus?" Regulus asked, taking a seat in the empty middle chair. "Did Harry truly face down the Dark Lord and defeat him again?"

"He did face Voldemort, but there was no defeat, only a reprieve, I'm afraid. Quirrell is dead, killed by Voldemort's retreating form as he left the possession."

Regulus met Severus' eyes, and they shared a troubled look. They'd all been preparing for this ever since the night of Voldemort's defeat, but of them all, Regulus was still in arguably the worst position, because when the time came, he was the one who'd need to go back to that monster. He'd grown his thick skin very quickly back in the day, and he'd paid in blood and tears for it, too, the pampered younger son of a proud Pure-blood family, but at least back then, he'd had the comfort of another person being there in some way, even if Severus' own involvement had always kept the Half-blood paradoxically as close to Voldemort himself as on the very fringes of the Death Eaters. Severus had been the one who'd taught Regulus Occlumency, and he'd been the to whom Regulus had gone, whether for information sharing or healing. They didn't need words to understand each other, and when it came to these types of situations, where control belonged to those more powerful than they and big movements were being made without their input, that skill was crucial to survival.

Regulus turned back to Albus and sighed. "I had assumed he'd attempt something of the kind, but I had not thought he'd find a way to pull Harry into it. I had misjudged what his actions would be."

"No, Regulus, I do not think any one of us could have expected that, not when we did not know that he was taking orders from Voldemort who resided inside of him," Dumbledore said, shaking his head. "The plan had failed even before it had been thought up; it is no one's fault."

"At least the boys are safe now," the younger Black agreed. "How are they?"

"Harry had lacerations and glass embedded in his left arm, and a severe case of migraine caused by forcible Legilimency and magical overuse. Evan had bruises on his torso and his feet and hands were badly cut from the glass. Madam Pomfrey has taken care of their injuries, and they will both be released tomorrow to finish off the year."

"And what of the Stone?"

"It will be destroyed. You needn't worry about it," Dumbledore replied calmly, not revealing to what arrangement he had come with Nicolas Flamel. It may have escaped everyone else's notice, but Severus had caught the underlying deception in that truthful statement – the Stone would be destroyed; Dumbledore had just neglected to mention when and how. After all, Voldemort was only the latest to try acquiring it from its creator. If Flamel had managed to keep it safely hidden for more than six hundred years, then there wasn't – and hadn't been in the first place – much reason to fear for its safety. Which brought Severus' anger surging back.

"You planned this whole thing from the start, not to help Flamel, but to prove your hypotheses correct," he stated quietly, clenching his fists until they were white. "Lily was right; you were intentionally misleading us in October. This whole thing, it was just one big ruse to, what, confirm that the Dark Lord is still out there? That is the plan you and Regulus had hatched out, isn't it? The one you just said failed because you'd let the Dark Lord reside at Hogwarts for a whole _year_."

How could he have been so blind as to miss this manipulation?

Dumbledore's gaze was infuriatingly calm, making Severus jump to his feet.

"Children could have been _killed_ , Albus! You brought a bait for one of the most dangerous wizards in existence into a _school_ filled with _children_! With _my son_! And when we confronted you, when _I_ confronted you, you played me like a marionette, and like an absolute idiot, I believed you when you said that it was only to help a friend. I believed you, and you tricked me."

He felt sick, felt like he was back in that moment eleven years ago, when he'd for the first time truly seen this great man before him for only what he was – a powerful man playing at benevolence.

"Severus." The voice was soft, and imploring, and regretful, but Severus couldn't allow himself for it to affect him, not right now; to do so would be to admit to himself that he'd fallen into the same trap he had all those years ago, that he'd let it happen for a second time. "You know me better than that."

"Do I?" he asked, clenching his jaw and staring the man down, not giving him whatever it was he was looking for; not giving him anything. "Do I really?"

"I hope you do," Albus answered.

"So it's not true, Albus?" Black butted in, half-way between bewildered and angered, and when their eye contact broke, so did the rising fury in Severus' chest, at least enough that he didn't turn and walk forever out of Albus' office and life. For all that he was insufferable, and deplorable, Black did know how to have good timing. "You _didn_ _'_ _t_ plan this whole thing from the start to lure _Moldyshorts_ of all people?"

"Not precisely," Albus answered, shaking his head. "I had suspicions of a spy in my midst since the reports of his sudden movements last summer. The truth, Severus, is that I had intended it as a bait, not for Voldemort – I had truly not believed him to be either capable or willing to approach Hogwarts, let alone enter it, even for the Stone – but for his agent planted in or around the school. Had I believed for a moment either to have the audacity to use my trap for Harry, I would never have brought the Stone here in the first place. A grave misjudgement on my part."

"A misjudgement that almost cost Harry his life!" Black barked out angrily.

The silence in the office was deafening in the wake of those words, filled with anger and disappointment and betrayal. Severus swallowed with difficulty, trying to stop himself from falling back into that twenty-year-old youngster he'd been the last time this had happened; Albus had changed, but it would be foolish to expect him to have changed so much for something like this to be beyond him.

It was Severus' own damn fault for holding that expectation in spite of his better judgment.

"You should have removed Quirrell the first moment you suspected him," he said quietly. "You should have checked him for mind manipulation as soon as you realised he was behaving abnormally."

"I should have," Albus agreed softly, "and that I didn't speaks to the complacency we've all fallen into since the night Voldemort was first defeated. Severus..."

Locking eyes with him, Severus found himself shaking his head. To convey what, it was beyond even him. That he wouldn't cast Albus aside the way he'd almost done eleven years ago? That he'd not forgiven him for this, because even the lies from October aside, this was Evan's life that had been placed on the line, the one thing Albus _knew_ Severus couldn't bear losing, not after Violet? That he needed time to accept that for all the bad that had come with it, Albus had been right to say that they had also gained extremely valuable information, too, and that this, perhaps, justified it to an extent?

He needed to speak with Lily about it, needed to sit down and carefully sift through all his thoughts and feelings on the matter before deciding where he and Albus stood now.

The horrid fact was that there wasn't much he could do about it, one way or another. Dumbledore was the only one who could lead the war against Voldemort, and he was far too old to stop thinking in Machiavellian terms now. He was who he was, and he would do what he wanted, suited for the position of Britain's main wizarding school's headmaster or not. They'd agreed – Severus and others around Albus – long ago that the only thing they could truly do was make certain he constantly remembered that his first priority, at least until Voldemort returned, were the children, and not the war that wasn't even being waged yet.

"You cannot do this again, Headmaster," Regulus said, finally breaking the silence that had, once again, fallen among them. "I did as you asked of me, because that was the position you'd put me in – the finished act, rather than the idea. I will not do it again; I don't care if it's the only way to win the war. You've started forgetting that your primary position is that of a guardian over the next generation, _the immediate guardian_ , and if you try anything of the sort again, I will make sure to remove you from this position, my other role notwithstanding."

"Lily will back him up," Sirius said before Dumbledore had a chance to open his mouth. "And you know that the two of them can swing both the Board and the Council if they set their minds to it."

"The children must come first, Headmaster; there is no point in winning the war if they aren't there to reap the rewards, and it is still only a hypothetical war at that."

Dumbledore sighed, almost aging before their eyes, and nodded with great weariness. "Very well. Perhaps I truly am getting too old for this."

"You are," Severus answered candidly. "But until the Dark Lord is removed, here is where you will stay, and the system we've managed to implement in the past ten years will work."

"Yes, Severus, I agree with you fully."

"I know," the Potions Master answered with a little bit too much resentment in his voice. "Otherwise we wouldn't have managed to get where we are today. Don't think we are ignorant of the fact that, had you truly wanted to dig your feet into the ground, you could have easily stopped us from implementing the reform."

"Now, if you wouldn't mind, I think we all deserve to know the _full_ extent of this thing," the elder Black said with a pointed look. "Do we know yet what precisely was done to the wards, and why did you make the other protections so easily penetrable, that Harry and his friends could figure them out?"

"For several reasons. You know the one already: I wished to catch the thief in the act, and to do so, I had to make certain that the protections would waste a great deal of his time, but not be unsolvable. I wasn't certain if it was a professor or a student when I first set them up. Certainly, I believed that no student could overcome them all. And even if they had done it, until Harry's unfortunate discovery of the Mirror of Erised, they would not have found anything."

"The whole thing was a decoy!"

"Precisely," the Headmaster confirmed. "Until the idea of hiding the Stone within the Mirror came to me, I had believed it much safer to keep the Stone at another location. Once the danger of Voldemort himself haunting the Forbidden Forest became known to me, that ceased to be a secure enough location, and I had it moved."

"How recently?" Black demanded to know.

"We have had several instances of unicorns being harmed in the Forbidden Forest in the past two months, and this coincided with Quirinus' general deterioration. While I had suspected him since Hallowe'en and the troll, I had not believed him to be in such close contact with Voldemort that I would need to rethink my original plans. By the time I felt quite convinced Voldemort was in the vicinity, the end of the year was far too close for me to find a conceivably justifiable reason for removing him from his post. I should have realised that my summons to the Ministry was in actuality another diversion, but considering some of the troubles Madam Meadowes has had since taking the post of our Minister, I had believed it to be a legitimate summons. I returned post haste the moment I realised it for what it was, by which time Harry and Evan had already gone through."

"So, this _wasn_ _'_ _t_ a test for him, too?"

Albus entwined his fingers on the desk and leaned forward.

"I will not lie to you and claim that I hadn't considered allowing Harry and his friends to try and pass; perhaps, at one point, I had even thought to plan something of the kind. But I had never intended for him to do it without my supervision, and especially not for him to face Voldemort at the end. Harry is far from stupid, and he has friends with him who excel at different things. Together, I was very confident they would make it, should I have let them stumble upon it in a controlled manner. But you tested the wards yourself, Sirius, and you know as well as I that, had Voldemort not created the loopholes in them that he had through Quirinus, they would not have been able to get through."

"Even so, Albus. Harry is not your weapon, to be wielded at your own bloody mistakes. This is the last time you test my son in any such way without my assent," Black said with such steel in his voice that Severus barely contained himself from gawking. Black had always been quite adamant about his relationship with the Potter child, and from what few chances Severus had had to observe them, he had always apparently behaved towards Potter as an uncle, rather than a father. These were the words that he had taken out of Severus' own mouth, and they didn't brook any argument. "The next time you try something like this, I _will_ take him away and you will never find us. He is my son, and I will not let you use him any which way you think appropriate, that prophecy be damned."

Dumbledore's visage darkened, aged, and his eyes quieted.

"I apologise, Sirius," the man said. "I had not intended to infringe on what has long ago been determined as your right."

"Just so we're clear," Black reiterated. A moment passed in stillness, before the elder brother relaxed back in his chair. "So, does this mean you think Harry needs additional training? We've confirmed Moldyshorts' existence now, and he knows that Harry's at least powerful enough to be a potential problem. Harry knows quite a bit of beginner spells, but if you cannot solve the problem of incompetent DADA instructors, then we need to make different arrangements, and I would like to know what you think of it."

"We really do have to look into that damned curse the Dark Lord placed on the position," Regulus murmured thoughtfully. "If we managed to get rid of Binns, then there has to be something to be done for this, as well."

"Never mind that now," his brother interrupted impatiently. "You know Moldyshorts' abilities best, Albus. What area of magic should Harry focus on?"

"Allow me to think on that," Dumbledore answered. "How secure is your home?"

"I'd say pretty secure," Black replied with a shrug. "It's no Grimmauld Place, but it's been safe for the past ten years."

"I'd like to place it under the Fidelius. With Voldemort resuming his activities – and considering he's dared enter and reside in Hogwarts, I should think that a given – I have little doubt his followers will soon do so, as well. Regulus, how is your Mark?"

"It's weakened again," Regulus replied without a note of emotion in his voice, then clarified for his frowning brother: "It had grown slightly stronger during the past months, but it's back to usual now."

"Yes, no doubt because of Voldemort's use of unicorn blood."

"That monster has no limits," Black growled out, voice laced with deep-seated disgust.

"Indeed he does not, and that is what makes him the most dangerous of opponents. Gentlemen, we must be exceedingly careful from here on out. This, I'm afraid, is but the first of the numerous attempts that will be made, both by him and by his followers, to return to power and kill Harry." Standing up, Dumbledore smiled at Sirius. "I think it best if I were the Secret Keeper, Sirius. I know it's your home," he said, raising his hands pre-emptively, "but Harry needs to remain safe for as long as possible, and I very much doubt Voldemort would attempt to retrieve the information if I alone held the key to it. You are much too valuable to Harry to be risking your life with this burden."

Black seemed to waver on the idea for a bit, before sighing.

"Harry isn't even spending most of his time at the house, Albus. A Fidelius would impede my everyday life far more than protect him for the few weeks he is there. I'm not saying no," he added hastily, "but I want to see if there's something else that would work until there really is a reason to fear for Harry's safety more than usual."

"Very well; it is your decision, of course. Now, while Severus had some time with his son, you didn't. I'm sure you can convince Poppy to let you see him."

Black must have noticed he was being dismissed – he cast a rather inquisitive look at his brother, and another put-upon one at Severus, which the Potions Master returned with a full-on sneer – but he allowed Albus to manhandle him out of the office and send him packing. Once the doors to the office were closed again, Albus re-seated himself at his desk and turned to the two of them.

"What of the Death Eater movements?"

"Lucius is planning something," Regulus said immediately. "From his pattern of movement, he's been researching something, though I cannot say what; he doesn't trust me enough, not after the trials and especially not with my close cooperation with the Council of Supervisors."

"Severus?"

"I might be able to gain some knowledge, but you know he doesn't speak of the Dark Lord's business to me, Albus," Severus replied with a shrug. "Although I was under the impression that he believed the man truly gone."

"Imbecile," Regulus scoffed with a roll of his eyes. "He's been as aware of the Mark changing as I, he knows very well the Dark Lord is not dead. Nott is lying low, but I'm not sure that is such a good thing. He's probably the one we should watch the most, given how far back with the Dark Lord he goes, and especially now he's the last of the initial group."

"Avery certainly knows nothing," Severus supplied. "Thistletwaithe wants the Dark Lord back about as much as we do, Macnair is too comfortable in his position in the Ministry to attempt searching him out, and Crabbe and Goyle take their cues from Malfoy. Of the others, I know very little."

"A large number of his most loyal followers is in Azkaban anyway," Regulus confirmed. "They're of no help to him right now, and I shudder to think what might happen if he manages to get Cousin Bellatrix out. That woman was mad before everything, after ten years with the Dementors..."

"Yes, well, we'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen," Severus replied tersely.

"You know, at least there's the good thing of Crouch Jr. being dead," Regulus concluded. "I swear I had never seen a more zealous kid when it came to the Dark Lord. As for others, most are simply too comfortable to try anything, and of those who aren't, a large percentage is incarcerated. It leaves a very small pool of suspects, and they'd never speak of it, even to another Death Eater. You can't know who's been turned in the past twelve years. I think we should keep our attention on Malfoy and Nott, they are most likely to be planning something."

"Be discreet, both of you. You are much too important to me to be lost in this endeavour. We have a few years yet, if we play our cards right, and it is essential that we do not overreach ourselves."

Regulus nodded in assent, and Severus only inclined his head in acceptance.

"And what of the other thing, Albus? Any progress?"

"Alas, I am still not any closer to the answer," Dumbledore said, sounding genuinely regretful. Severus frowned, wondering at the strange wording, though the answer was obvious enough, even if it left him unsettled. "For now, it is enough that the status quo be maintained."

"Yes, Headmaster," Regulus agreed grudgingly, obviously dissatisfied with the answer. The two left the Headmaster's office together, walking to the hospital wing, as Regulus wanted to see both of the boys.

"He doesn't know that you've informed me of the Dark Lord's... artefact?"

Regulus gave him a pointed look. "Do you imagine he would have reacted in any positive way, had I told him?"

"No, I do not. The progress of which you spoke then..."

"Destroying it; though he doesn't seem very interested in pursuing it."

"Albus has always been a bit too curious for our good; we might need to do something about this if he dawdles any longer."

Severus had forgotten that fact, for a while; he wasn't likely to forget it again any time soon, though, not now he'd been reminded of the old man's scheming ways and his own blindness to it.

"Yes, though I'd hoped not to have any more... personal involvement with this pursuit than was necessary. What do you really think of this, Severus?"

"I think the man's forgotten they are children," he replied, sneering with disgust.

"But you agree they must be prepared."

"Yes, but not through encouraging rash, unthinking attitude the Potter brat constantly displays. And I don't like that Albus is so determined to pull Evan into it. I have worked very hard to maintain the image of reserve throughout the war, so that I can play to whatever fiddle he needs me to."

"You and I both know, Severus, that you lost that position the moment you officiated your marriage with Lily," Regulus pointed out with a smirk. "She's, pardon the wording, seen as a Mudblood in those circles, and your standing was already shaky due to your own background. Lucius seems to trust you to an extent, but I believe he's the only one who will. And when the Dark Lord returns, he won't be looking favourably on your actions the past decade."

"So I should just let Albus manipulate my only child into becoming his chess piece for this war?"

"No, but you should consider that he might be in danger however you look at it, even apart from what happened yesterday and what he could infer of Evan from it. You know the Dark Lord sees the Slytherin House as his own, however misguided that may be, and the fact that Evan is not only your child, but Lily's as well, puts him at a great risk, to say nothing of the fact that, like it or not, Evan is powerful, and Dumbledore is not going to miss that, just like he won't miss Alya's value."

"As he didn't miss mine," Severus concluded with a sigh. "That does not mean I will not do everything in my power to prevent my son becoming entangled with it."

"Oh, I am aware of that," Regulus assured him with a smile, before shaking his head. "As for Dumbledore's behaviour, while I do not in any way wish to play the Devil's advocate, there is something to be said for the fact that highly stressful situations bring out the most powerful magics in the most powerful of witches and wizards."

"You cannot be telling me–"

"I am not," Regulus assured him. "The situation as it had developed was not acceptable. However, I do think the idea of having Harry pass the enchantments a good one, no matter what my brother feels; had it been done under supervised conditions, but without Harry knowing that... well, simply give some thought to the fact that your best potions always were and still are those that you were forced to make for _him_ , and I think you will understand what I mean."

Oh, yes, Severus understood Regulus' point perfectly, and not only from his own experience – Evan _had_ performed a staggeringly difficult feat of magic under pressure just last night, having Legilimised the Potter boy not only wandlessly, but in a very unique way as well. Nor had it ever escaped Severus that Albus tended to think along these same lines as a general habit. But there was a big difference between simply throwing children into dangerous situations and trusting that they would have the instincts and the cool heads to use all at their disposal, and simulating such conditions under careful supervision to ensure that they weren't, in fact, in any danger. And a headmaster of a school should know the difference between child endangerment and defence preparation.

Still, the fact stood that, in this case, things had gone out of control due to a lack of attention paid to small details, and that Albus, at least, hadn't wanted the children to be in such danger, which made it at least somewhat different to the Christmas of 1980. And it was this thought that convinced Severus to loosen his hold of the anger at Albus enough to be able to properly consider how to move forward.

"Perhaps, but I was of age, and far better prepared for it than they were for what happened yesterday," he said in the end, closing the discussion. By then, they'd reached the hospital wing, and Severus decided it was better to leave this discussion for another day, especially when he noticed a familiar head of red hair sitting by his son's bed.

* * *

Sirius pretended to ignore Snape Junior when he first walked back into the hospital wing and sat himself beside Harry's bed. The sullen Slytherin might have not noticed it, being engrossed in some book or other, but Harry himself knew his guardian well enough to notice the strange looks he was giving the boy. It felt weirdly as if he was wondering how in the world the other boy even existed, something that Harry found great amusement in.

"You acted stupidly, kiddo," Sirius said after a long moment of silence, turning back to meet Harry's blue eyes. "I'm proud of you, for protecting yourself and a student you don't like–"

"Sure, that's what it is," Harry agreed with a snort.

"–but you could have been killed," Sirius finished, ignoring his little comment.

"Mum protected me," he said softly, picking a thread in his blanket. "Voldemort couldn't touch me because she gave her life to protect me."

"She loved you more than anything, Harry, never forget that."

Harry nodded in assent, but his heart wasn't in it. When he was home, flying on his broom or playing with Padfoot, he could pretend he was just another kid, with a mum who would make him a sandwich even when he didn't know he was hungry, who would read him stories and tuck him into bed. He had a dad, the best dad a kid would ever want, in his opinion. Even now, he couldn't but compare what Sirius had said to what Snape's father had told him. Sirius was proud of him; Snape's father was disappointed in his own son.

He had a dad, all right. He didn't particularly understand the importance of having a father, since all the fathers he'd witnessed were like Snape's. But he had a dad, and that was enough, most of the time.

And then there were times like these, as his head jerked instinctively towards the opening door, his eyes glued to the pretty red-haired woman whose green eyes only saw the boy in the adjacent bed as she strode hurriedly over to him, times when the ache in his chest was nearly unbearable. Watching the woman pull her startled son into her arms, listening to her words of scolding and love, Harry felt jealousy rise like bile in his throat, jealousy that this sleazy, secretive, slimy little Slytherin got to be hugged by his mother, got to be fussed over and loved so openly, while Harry himself could only dream of what it would feel like. It wasn't fair.

The Slytherin looked flushed when his mother finally let him go, but he didn't pull away his hand when she grasped it with both of hers, and Harry clenched his fists in order to stop the treacherous tears from falling when he saw the content little smile on the other boy's face. It was so unfair.

"Hey, Sirius," Mrs Snape said, turning to them, her eyes filled with gentle compassion. "Harry. I hope you feel better soon."

She wanted to say more, of that, there was no doubt. She wanted to scold and rant and rave, that much was clearly written on her face. But she didn't. She just sat there, in the chair next to her son's bed, and held his hand tightly in both of hers. Harry turned his eyes away from the sight and pretended to be interested in some of the sweets on his nightstand. In that moment, he hated Evan Snape from the bottom of his heart, for having the one thing Harry had wanted all his life, and could never have.

"You and I, however, will have a discussion as soon as you get back home," he heard her say, the promise ringing clearly in her tone and words.

"Mum, Dad already read me the riot act." Snape's voice was tinged with a whining note that was very foreign to Harry. It certainly wasn't there when the boy accepted his father's scolding.

"I know, and that's the only reason we're not discussing this now, in public, in front of Harry and Sirius, so be grateful for it. You scared me to death, Evan. I don't know what I would have done if I'd lost you down there!"

Harry squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath through his nose, but the tears fell anyway, he couldn't stop them. He just hoped no one would see.

In a moment of some instinctive insight, Sirius seemed to notice his distress and understand it, because before Harry could do anything about it, he was pulled roughly into his guardian's side and held there, just held until he could get a hold of himself again. The familiar scent of sandalwood and the forest was comforting, helping to alleviate the pain in his chest, reminding him that even if he didn't have a mum, or a father, he still had his godfather, he had someone who loved him and who took care of him, and that he didn't really need more, not when he had Sirius to hug him and tell him that he was loved, that he belonged. When he finally opened his eyes, Sirius' arms loosened, and Harry was allowed to settle back against his pillows, his cheeks wiped dry and his eyes no longer teary. All that remained was the jealousy, and that, he couldn't get rid of so easily.

To his surprise, Regulus Black was in the room with them when he looked around, while Snape's father stood by his wife, the three in a quiet conversation Harry had no wish to listen in on. Instead, he focused on his pseudo-uncle, giving him a bright, fake smile (and hoping like hell he wasn't blushing for having found it so easy to suspect him of working with Voldemort).

"Hey, Uncle Reg!"

"Harry. I hear you had a fun end of the year."

Harry shrugged in response. "Everyone seems to think so."

"Facing the Dark Lord is no easy task. I wouldn't have done half so well as you."

"Well, I'm glad he's not back," he replied, somewhat eager to move on from that topic of conversation. In Harry's opinion, it was thoroughly exhausted. "So, I saw you here a couple of times. Were you visiting someone?"

"Professor Slughorn," Regulus replied with such ease Harry would have believed him, had he not seen him threaten Quirrell in the forest – though now he was left wondering what had _really_ been going on there. "You know I was in his Slug Club, and he wanted to organise a get-together for all of his former students, so he asked for my help."

That reminded him. "Hey, Regulus, Snape said his father was three times better than Slughorn at potion-making. But I once saw his Slug Club pictures, and Snape's father isn't in them."

"Oh, he is, he's just usually hard to notice. Severus was in Slug Club with me and Lily, it's just that Slughorn never really thought he'd amount to much. A case of vanity-driven jealousy, between us."

"So, he's really as good as Snape claims?" Harry asked, very dubious. Slughorn was far from his favourite teacher, but the man was an excellent potioneer, knew exactly what he was teaching them.

"Do you honestly doubt that, after that little obstacle of his you had to pass?" Regulus questioned with a raised eyebrow, to which Harry just shrugged dismissively.

"Snape solved that one, but that really didn't tell me anything. He's the man's son, after all."

"Harry, you'd do well not to disqualify either Snape before you know their full worth."

"Oh, come on, Reggie," Sirius cut in with a roll of his eyes. "He may be great at potions, but he's a sleaze."

"Only because you provoke him, Siri."

"And that boy of his, as quick to draw his wand against Harry as Snivellus was against us back in the day."

"Well, Evan is his father's son," Regulus replied with a shrug. "And Harry is his father's son, as well. Let's just leave it at that. That reminds me, Harry – Dahlia, Alya and I wanted to invite you to come with us to Vienna for two weeks over the summer. Would you like that?"

"Sure," Harry said, slightly taken aback. Regulus was over from time to time, and Alya came with him more often than not, but he had little contact with Regulus' wife, Dahlia Black. She always seemed like a lovely woman to him, regal and very comfortable in her position of high aristocracy, but he almost never went over to the old Black house, so he very rarely saw her. Still, traveling for two weeks was, in his opinion, a good way of spending part of his vacation, and he'd heard enough about Vienna from Alya to be interested.

What completely escaped his notice was the rather significant look Sirius gave his brother, or the responding shrug Regulus gave in return. No matter how observant, Harry was, after all, not even twelve yet, and the complexities of human interactions were, to some extent, well beyond him. And that was all right, because no matter how much he liked relying primarily on himself, the fact was that Harry had a safety net composed of the people who loved him and cared for him – his guardian and his uncles and his friends and his parents' friends too – and so long as that was the case, he would never be forced to face his destiny unknowing and alone. Until then, in spite of everything, he was allowed to be just an eleven-year-old boy with a penchant for adventure.

* * *

Harry and Snape were both kept in the hospital wing for another night, and it turned out to be a very eventful one, too – Harry got woken up from his own Quirrellmort-induced nightmare by Snape screaming his head off, kicking in his bed and then actually falling off of it, all from what Madam Pomfrey eventually explained was a night terror. Harry, who'd never in his life experienced anyone doing anything even remotely similar, was left both terrified and flabbergasted by the whole thing, because the other boy went back to sleep as if nothing had happened when Madam Pomfrey managed to guide him back into the bed, and in the morning, he truly appeared not to remember a single thing about it – though he looked horrified enough when he realised Harry had witnessed it.

They got released from the hospital wing on Sunday morning, and Harry ended up fielding questions from his fellow Gryffindors in between going through some hasty last-minute revisions for the following week. Exams came and went with startling speed and rising heat of early summer, and most first-years passed with, if not flying colours, then at least satisfactory impressions. McGonagall praised Harry for his practical portion, calling him a natural and declaring him the best in the year in this regard, though in the end his written portion pulled his grade down enough for Granger to overtake him in that class; Ron, Dean and Seamus seemed happy enough with most of their performances once the grades came in, and admitted, if a bit grudgingly, that the study group was a good idea, so much as all of them had hated having to do it.

The Slytherin won the House Cup in the end; Harry and Oliver had managed to drag Gryffindor out of the depths of low, _low_ points with that Quidditch match against Ravenclaw, but it ended up not being quite enough to get them back to where they'd been in the spring. For the End-of-Year Feast, the Great Hall was decked out in the Slytherin colours of green and silver (for the seventh year in a row, no less), with a huge banner showing the Slytherin serpent covering the wall behind the High Table.

People seemed quite eager to hear what, exactly, had happened between Harry and Quirrell in between the exams, though Harry continued to evade giving proper answers, because Dumbledore had made them all promise not to say anything to anyone until he had the official word. Harry was hopeful that would happen soon, because his Housemates really _were_ persistent when they wanted to be, and he himself was split as to how he felt about sharing the story – on the one hand, it _had_ been for the most part an excellent adventure, but on the other, he still had frequent nightmares about what he'd done to Quirrell, and now every time he heard the man screaming in his dreams, Snape also somehow popped in to scream, too, because of that night in the hospital wing. Luckily for him, Harry rarely really remembered his own dreams, and compared to those disturbing ones about the forest, that left him with a headache, these were easy enough to shake off, meaning that his mood stayed as up as it usually did. Still, it was going to be nice when the year was finally over.

Dumbledore made them all wait until the very last evening, which almost made Harry want to go up to his office and beg him to do it sooner, but he refrained. There was something that felt almost right about him mentioning it only at the Leaving Feast, perhaps because it felt like he was closing out the year completely with it, so that the whole student body could move on, so in the end Harry found himself not resenting it as much as he sometimes thought he might, given how exhausting fielding questions had turned out to be when all was said and done.

"Another year gone!" Dumbledore declared once everyone had arrived and taken their seats. "And I must trouble you with an old man's wheezing waffle before we sink our teeth into our delicious feast. What a year it has been! Hopefully your heads are all a little fuller than they were... you have the whole summer ahead to get them nice and empty before next year starts–"

"Albus!" McGonagall said, a little too loudly, glaring at him and receiving an innocent smile from the Headmaster in return that prompted the room into giggles.

"Oh, very well; I do hope that you will keep all that knowledge you've gained and put it to good use, as I am hopeful we will finally manage to gain some new professors in the coming year, whom you should duly try to impress. Now, as I understand it, the House Cup here needs awarding and the points stand thus: in fourth place, Gryffindor, with three hundred and forty-eight points; Hufflepuff in third place, with three hundred and fifty-two; Ravenclaw have four hundred and twenty-six; and Slytherin, four hundred and seventy-two."

And, of course, the Slytherins had to cheer for that.

"Yes, yes, well done, Slytherin," Dumbledore said with a nod, continuing in a far more sombre tone. "Now, to address the rumours I have no doubt you've all become aware of, namely of the events that transpired several days ago that led to the passing of one of our professors – as you may remember, I had, at the beginning of the year, warned everyone not to approach the third floor corridor on pain of death. Professor Quirinus Quirrell, unfortunately, did not heed these warnings; your young colleagues, Misters Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley and Evan Snape, risked their very lives to save Professor Quirrell, for which I must award each with fifty points; furthermore, I would like to award Mr Neville Longbottom and Miss Hermione Granger ten points each, for having the courage to stand up to their friends – which can be quite as daunting a task as standing up to one's enemies – as, while their friends' actions commend their hearts, they were not ones that I can condone as their headmaster." And here he gave Harry a pointed look, which made the eleven-year-old grow hot in the face. "I will leave it to them to give you the details of the events that transpired, and will only speak further in order to assure you that the circumstances leading to the existence of such dangerous situations on the third floor have now been resolved, and therefore, the corridor will be open for use as of the beginning of next year."

"Ehm," Flitwick caught to get Dumbledore's attention.

"Ah, of course; Professor Flitwick would like me to inform you, as well, that his class will be moved back into his usual classroom on the third floor with the resolution of these events. Now, with the addition of these points, I believe the final count stands at five hundred and twenty-two points for Slytherin, four hundred and fifty-eight points for Gryffindor, four hundred and thirty-six points for Ravenclaw, and three hundred and fifty-two points for Hufflepuff."

Well, it didn't change the decorations, but at least they were in second place instead of fourth, Harry decided with a shrug.

"Aw, man!" one of the Weasley twins said, speaking to Harry over a few other heads. "If only you'd told us you'd go be a hero right when we'd planned our big performance so that we could have waited a day or two, we'd have been able to win the House Cup now."

"Oh, big deal," Sally-Anne, the only Muggle-born Gryffindor girl from Harry's year, said with a roll of her eyes. "It's only for today anyway, and it's not like we'd get anything else out of it."

"Well, other than bragging rights," her friend Sally confirmed. "But then we already _have_ bragging rights, what with Harry in our House and all."

"Exactly! We should at least get free sweets! I mean, if it was decorations for the whole year, I wouldn't say anything, but it's just the few days until we leave. I mean, it's nice to win, but... free sweets, at least!"

"She's a sweets monster," Sally pretend-whispered to everyone around her.

"I completely agree," Oliver got involved. "Besides, we won the Quidditch Cup, didn't we? Thanks to Harry here."

"So, double bragging rights!" Sally exclaimed.

"Hm," a Weasley twin said thoughtfully. "You know, if we're going to be stuffing the House Cup, then we might as well do it properly."

"Brother mine," the other said, a wicked smirk developing on his face, "I like the way you think."

"What's that mean?" Angelina asked them.

"Next year..."

"We're going _all_ out!"

Percy, from where he was sitting between Oliver and Ron, groaned and let his head fall to the table.

* * *

The exam results came back a few days before the Leaving Feast, temporarily hijacking the rumour mill from what had been the absolute topic of conversation – what exactly had happened to Quirrell, that Dumbledore had needed to take over supervising the DADA lessons in the last couple of weeks of class, and what exactly had happened that Friday night in the forbidden third floor of the castle. Evan met Hermione in the Great Hall to go over theirs once everyone had received them, and to no one's surprise, she was top of the class in most everything, only coming second to him in Potions. She even managed to beat out Potter for Transfiguration, and was miles ahead of everyone in Charms. Evan, for his part, managed to scrape through in Transfiguration on the strength of his written work far more than practical, and was in the bottom third of their Charms class, pulling strong in Herbology (though not the top, that had gone to Hermione and Neville, who ended up sharing the spot, which had made Evan quite proud of his shy, insecure friend) and, of course, best of their year in Potions. As for the non-magical subjects, he was higher up in Science and Mathematics than, for instance, in Sociology and History, but that was right par for the course, as natural sciences came to him far easier than social sciences, so it was quite all right.

"Oh, next year we'll be assigned differently," Hermione said with a smile. "We'll be able to share most of our classes then."

"Just not the ones where I could really use your help," he noted. "But yeah; I'll finally get to have a _proper_ Potions partner."

That was going to be a _lot_ of fun.

"Oh, did Potterprat think to mention to you whom they were suspecting for attempted theft?" he asked her, remembering that she might not know. "Regulus Black, his guardian's brother and my friend Alya's dad – you'll get to meet her at my birthday party – apparently because he saw the guy threatening Quirrell, _and_... get this, my dad!"

"I'm sorry?"

"Yeah, can you believe it?! My dad, of all people! Apparently, Finnigan had seen him doing the counter-jinx that day at the Quidditch match, and began stalking him about after Christmas hols, whenever Dad and I had our Occlumency sessions."

"Oh, those boys are ridiculous," she huffed with a shake of her head. "And if he'd only thought to tell _me_ all of this, you and I would have figured out that it was Quirrell ages ago."

"Precisely," he agreed smugly, then grimaced. "Still, if I'd not forgotten that I'd heard Quirrell be threatened by someone, maybe we could have figured it out regardless, but it had completely slipped my mind. Also, I think they've finally cottoned on to the fact that you told me everything they told you, so I don't think they'll be as open to speaking with you next year about their business as they were until now."

"I know. But it was still worth it to try and stop them from doing something stupid."

"If you say so."

"I do," she confirmed primly, and Evan smiled.

They were off for home two days later, and this time, he shared his compartment with Hermione, Theo, Tracey and Neville, much better company than when he'd first gone up to Hogwarts in September. They spent the day playing Exploding Snap and Uno, which Hermione had to teach the two Pure-bloods, and when he got off the train, his mum and dad were there, standing with the Weasleys and the Grangers and waiting for him, so that he could begin the summer properly.

It was going to be fun.

* * *

 **A/N:** So, that's all folks! This story is officially complete. I hope you've found it enjoyable, and realistic enough given the changes from canon. I'm aware that most people probably thought my Harry worse than canon!Harry, and Evan maybe resembles Severus a bit too much in some places, but when you consider it as a whole, keep in mind that from the start I'd planned this series to cover the whole seven years of canon, and characters must always evolve in some way or another. This is, in so many ways, the starting point, tallying the status-quo, let's say, as well as summarizing the world-building changes that were carried over from the previous decade (and the events of _The Path Not Tread_ ). Having said that, I hope the reasons for why these characters act the way they do was logical enough given their backgrounds, and that you can forgive them their flaws with the knowledge that, as they age and experience what we all know is coming from canon, they will grow and mature, and hopefully become likeable in spite of, or because of, who they are underneath all the superficial glazing.

I will be putting up a sort of fill-in-the-blanks one-shot collection that will span the whole AU from PNT to L&S, featuring a variety of characters, times and situations, so be on the lookout for it (I already have a few chapters that'll be useful before the next story in this timeframe goes up). Aside from that, the next story in the series will be called ' **The Lion, The Snake and The Chamber** ', and will cover the events of CoS, starting with the summer hols and going through the fight with the Basilisk. All the major events are planned out, though I've not yet started writing it, because I'm focusing my efforts on The Path Not Tread (I'm about half-way done with it now that I've got time on my hands, and hopefully I can start putting it up soon). LSC should go faster than PNT, mostly because I'm following canon, so it's generally easier to organize myself about writing it. Still, this is the story where bigger changes will be coming into play compared to canon. Some small spoilers, for those who are interested or impatient:

\- There will be a new study club called 'The Founders' Clique'; you can guess who'll be in it, but as helpful hints - they'll all be Pure-blood, and you've already met three out of four founding members in my story or canon already. The fourth is the child of a side character from PNT

\- The Diary will find its way to Hogwarts, but its ultimate discovery and destruction won't pass as unremarked (with respect to what it is) as it did in canon; Horcruxes are more than just a theory in this AU at this point in time

\- Putting the puzzle pieces together will be a group effort, and so will the rescue at the end be, including one unexpected volunteer

\- Summer will be all about family - dealing with old family members, and bonding with new. No babies, though (to preempt any speculation - and disappointment)

\- Remus and Severus are both coming to Hogwarts, and of course, new faculty besides them will be employed, so expect a bit more excitement on that front; unfortunately, Lockhart is a necessary evil, but what would a year at Hogwarts look like if the DADA teacher _de l'année_ didn't have it out for Harry in some way or other

\- Finally, we've not nearly seen the last of the animosity between Harry and Evan, but they'll have to start getting a bit more creative about it, with the adults doing their best to curb their mutual vindictive and destructive tendencies, and with even more people with ties to both of them coming to Hogwarts

Before I finally close out, I have to give a great, heart-felt THANK YOU to my wonderful quasi-beta Moon999, who's always been patient and persistent in reading anything and everything that I sent her pertaining to this world, who's always encouraged my ideas and debated the psychological merits of my choices with me, and who has become one of my best friends in the past nine months. Also, thank _you_ , my faithful readers, for sticking it out with me and this story, for commenting and favoriting and following it for the past year and a change that it's taken me to put it up. I hope you've enjoyed the ride, and I hope to see you again when LSC finally goes up!


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